Don’t Upgrade the ALS, Build a New Synchrotron in Florida Instead
The next American light source shouldn’t be an upgrade, it should be a clean start. Upgrades preserve jobs, history, and infrastructure, but they also preserve outdated beamlines, allocation models, and science priorities. The most strategically useful thing a synchrotron can do now is high-throughput tomography. Imaging that serves large scales and small materials, batteries, chips, integrated circuits, critical minerals, and radiation environments found in space. Imaging that doesn’t need a hero PI (sorry readers I know thats probably you) to get funded, one that supports real products and their timelines.
Florida is the right location in my opinion. It sits inside a growing aerospace and materials corridor. SpaceX, Blue Origin, defense contractors, battery startups, chip fabs … all of them need CT infrastructure that doesn’t exist yet. They need repeatable, reliable and predictable access not shifts built on grants and distributed by ancient beaurcracy. User support as part of the product, not as a favor. It should not be another national facility trying to serve everyone equally. It should serve the problems that are immediate. Built for industry workflows, scheduled and integrated. Contracts. Pay-per-sample. Ubiquitous formats, queueable, reconstructable, programmable. All the things that synchrotron are currently not. Leave exploration to the other synchrotrons. And demand for this already exists with companies like Lumafield, Sigray, Zeiss, Glimpse that are scaling the mid-tier while currently the high end still belongs to the synchrotrons. Give them each a corner of the ring and let them duke it out, let them buy and sell ports on the open market.
Upgrades won’t get us there. Everyone that works at a national lab with a synchrtron knows how deep the ruts in the road already are. $1B modernization of the shell still leaves the incentives in place: the beamlines get better but serve the same legacy. The pandemic helped prove what science can do when its sigularly focused. If national competitiveness is a real priority, this is where it starts. Synchrotrons turn inspection into insight and validate materials, confirm assemblies, raise the floor for every sector that builds anything. Let ALS and SSRL age out, or continue with what they do best. Let Florida build the machine we actually need, the one that NSLS II and APS-U really don’t want to do … the yucky business stuff.
