DOE Updates 'Facilitieis For Future Of Science' Outlook Guide

WASHINGTON, DC – The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science today released a comprehensive update of its landmark 2003 publication, Facilities for the Future of Science: A Twenty-Year Outlook, that shows the agency has made “significant progress” in deploying the scientific facilities and instruments that the United States needs to capture world scientific leadership, extend the frontiers of science and support the Department’s missions.

When it was published four years ago, the Facilities Outlook was the first long-range facilities plan prioritized across disciplines ever issued by a government science funding agency anywhere in the world. It remains so today – and serves a model for other countries and regions that are developing roadmaps for research infrastructures.

The 2003 plan listed 28 new scientific facilities and upgrades of current facilities that will define scientific opportunities over the next 20 years in all fields of science supported by the Office of Science, including fusion energy, advanced scientific computation, materials science, biological and environmental science, high energy physics and nuclear physics. The facilities were ranked according to their scientific importance and readiness for construction, and they spanned scientific fields to ensure the U.S. retains its primacy in critical areas of science and technology well into this century.

“The world-leading scientific facilities we create, maintain and operate are key to continued U.S. leadership in physical and biological research,” writes Under Secretary for Science Dr. Raymond L. Orbach in the introduction of Four Years Later: An Interim Report on ‘Facilities for the Future of Science: A Twenty-Year Outlook.’ “This leadership, and the transformational scientific discoveries that flow from it, are critical to meeting the challenges our Nation faces in the twenty-first century in the areas of both global economic competitiveness and energy security.”

Department of Energy News Release, Oct. 16, 2007
To obtain the full text of the report, please click here.