Sen. Tim Kaine pushes for a $1 billion collider at Jefferson Lab in Newport News

Inside cavernous Hall C at Jefferson Lab in Newport News, Sen. Tim Kaine  stood under massive structures of concrete and steel that are used to help blast electrons at targets in the name of science.

Nuclear physicist Cynthia Keppel was walking the senator through the ongoing $340 million upgrade to the lab's electron beam accelerator to double its energy and enable it to peer even deeper into the inner structure of protons and nuclei.

"And all of the experiments," Kaine  said, "are basically about what is the substructure of a fundamental building block, of a nucleus or …"

"That's it," Keppel said. "What are we made of? What are the stars made of?"

"It's amazing that we need something so big to be able to isolate and understand things that are so small," Kaine  said. "That's incredible. There's some kind of a life lesson there."

It was Kaine 's second visit to the lab — his first was during his stint as governor. On Friday, he touted the facility for helping position Virginia as a leader in cutting-edge nuclear research.

"Especially when you combine it with the (Newport News) shipyard and private-sector nuclear expertise in Lynchburg," Kaine  said. "Virginia is really at the forefront of nuclear research and application in the country."

Jefferson Lab — officially the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility — is run for the U.S. Department of Energy by Jefferson Science Associates LLC.

The upgrade to its Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) is nearly complete, said the lab's deputy director for science Robert McKeown. The work began in 2009 and should be done sometime in 2017.

Now the lab is trying to position itself as the best candidate for a new underground Electron Ion Collider (EIC) the DOE is considering. The collider would be used to study quantum chromodynamics, the theory that describes how quarks and gluons build protons, neutrons and nuclei.

This year, state lawmakers provided $4.6 million as seed money for a site evaluation for the project after initially denying the funding last year.

The EIC was first pegged as a $600 million project, but McKeown now says it's closer to $1 billion. According to a 2014 study, he said, its construction and initial operation would create a cumulative 4,974 jobs in Hampton Roads over seven to 10 years.

"It would be a very good thing for the local economy as well as bring a strong enhancement for the lab," McKeown said.

But the lab is vying for the project against Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. The DOE's Nuclear Science Advisory Committee will ultimately decide whether to build the collider and, if so, who will get it.

If it goes forward, Kaine  said he believes Congress will come up with the funding, despite ongoing struggles with mandatory annual federal budget cuts known as sequestration.

"Everything in the funding area is hard, so never take anything for granted on the funding side," Kaine  said. "However, this is a huge priority for DOE and for the next generation of theoretical nuclear physics research. So that doesn't mean a hundred percent that we'd find the funding, but it would be a high priority.

"The studies that are done here, the studies that come out of our research labs have transformed American life, from the Manhattan Project to today, in interesting ways. And the state of the research isn't done. So if you want to not just stand still but continue to move forward in your understanding of fundamental nuclear physics and how that can be applied, you need to look at new research institutions, and this would be a promising one."

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