In the USSR, they tried to build their own collider. The superproject was laid down already at the end of the great state and showed great promise in the domestic scientific community. His fate, however, turned out to be difficult. Now this giant is still waiting in the wings, mothballed in the south of the Moscow region.
In the Soviet Union, they wanted to have everything of their own. And it was not only about some kind of competition with the rest of the world. A country with such colossal human and natural resources simply had to create something that others could not do. And if analogues already existed, then the goal was to do exactly the same thing, only more and better! One of these projects was the UNK "Protvino". This abbreviation hides the term "accelerator-storage complex". It was created on the basis of the Institute of High Energy Physics in Protvino, a small town in the south of the Moscow region.
This complex was supposed to become a domestic proton-neutron collider on superconducting magnets, the same as the Large Hadron Collider at the European Council for Nuclear Research, which is located in Geneva. The start of the project was inspiring and promising, however, unfortunately for domestic science, everything did not go as planned.
The first stone of the UNK was laid in 1983. For 11 years in dry rocks at a depth of 20 to 60 meters, it was possible to dig a circular tunnel with a diameter of 5 meters. For every 1.5 kilometers underground, special sections were made for the installation of large-sized scientific equipment. Each such room was connected to the surface using a special shaft.
The tunnel was completed by 1994. At the same time, they began to build a new underground wing of the UNK, the length of the tunnel was 2.7 kilometers. The complex was fully electrified, beam observing devices were installed, and a vacuum system was installed.
By 1994, the UNK already included such important elements as the U-70 proton accelerator, an injection channel for introducing a proton beam into the collider ring, an antiproton channel, and a cryogenic body. However, the project did not go further. In 1994, due to a lack of money, work at the UNK was suspended, and soon the complex was completely frozen. The project is in such a sad state even now.
The Soviet Union created many large-scale things that take your breath away. Here is the present Soviet "wonder of the world", which became a gift and a curse for Egyptby solving a lot of problems and adding no less.