MSU, Energy Dept. sign deal for FRIB

EAST LANSING — Michigan State University has signed a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy for the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams project. The deal clears the path for the Department of Energy Office of Science to provide financial assistance to MSU to design and establish the new facility.

FRIB will be a DOE National User Facility within the department’s Office of Nuclear Physics portfolio and located on the MSU campus in East Lansing. FRIB will be a new research tool for probing into the heart of atoms.

MSU’s commitment to putting its own money into the cutting-edge nuclear research facility helped to sway the U.S. Department of Energy to award the project to MSU, a DOE spokeswoman said when confirming the awarding of the project last December.

The FRIB project is expected to cost approximately $550 million to design and build and is projected to create hundreds of jobs in mid-Michigan and generate more than $187 million in new state tax revenue, according to an economic impact study by the Anderson Economic Group of East Lansing. 

MSU lobbied heavily to win the FRIB project, a cutting-edge physics laboratory that would replace the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory on the East Lansing campus. The DOE picked MSU over the University of Chicago/Argonne National Laboratory.

Construction is expected to begin in 2013, last for about four years and bring 5,000 jobs to Michigan, according to the Anderson Economic Group, which prepared an economic analysis for MSU’s application. The economic impact for the state would amount to $1 billion.

Once the research facility is operational, it is expected to employ 400 people. Currently, MSU employs 300 at the NSCL, 100 of them students, said communications manager Geoff Koch.

Birgit Klohs, president of local economic development organization The Right Place, said upon the announcement in December the FRIB is an important piece of research infrastructure that elevates Michigan’s stature and makes the state more attractive to companies in the life and other sciences.

“It depends, of course, on who you are pitching to,” Klohs said. “It does connect very much into the life sciences development in the area. I’m not sure you can always draw a direct straight line. This is a great win for the state. That’s exactly what we are trying to build — an additional economy in Michigan built around the life sciences.”

The leadership committee involved in supporting MSU’s bid included local faces such as Doug DeVos, Richard DeVos, James Hackett, Michael Jandernoa, Joseph C. Papa, Dick Posthumus, Steven Van Andel and Peter Secchia, whose name graces the new MSU medical school building in Grand Rapids.

“I worked with a lot of people I don’t normally work with,” Secchia added at the time, noting the number of Democrats and University of Michigan connections on the 44-member committee.

The FRIB facility will have a number of economic reverberations in Michigan, first in the actual build out of the facility and the jobs associated with that, and, later with the influx of new scientists, their support staff and the ancillary support required to operate and maintain  a major scientific facility, David Hollister, president and CEO of Prima Civitas Foundation, told the Business Journal in December. That’s estimated to be more than $1 billion over the next decade when the multiplier effect is factored in, he noted.

Hollister, a former legislator, former mayor of Lansing and former director of the Michigan Department of Consumer & Industry Services, said he believes the FRIB facility will once and for all put to rest the image of Michigan as the Rust Belt.

“When you talk about a rare isotope accelerator, you’re talking ‘transformational.’ This is the epitome of cutting-edge research,” Hollister stressed. “We competed with the best of the best, and we won this extraordinary competition. We competed with a federal lab, for God’s sake, and beat them because of our infrastructure, the leadership of the university, the region, the work force, the science being done here, the history of the cyclotron and its excellence, and the fact that we’re second only to MIT in generating student scientists.”

People will be coming here from all over the world to visit and do science, and when they come, and if they bring their families, whether they’re going to work here for six months or six years, they are going to insist on a high quality of life, culture and education, he said.

“The ramifications are just extraordinary,” he added. He gave credit to former MSU President Peter McPherson, who started the ball rolling in this direction in 2002.  When McPherson left, President Lou Anna Simon kept running with the ball, he said.