Gov. Rod Blagojevich selected NIU President John Peters to serve on a task force to bring a $1 billion accelerator project to the Argonne National Laboratory.

“Somebody made a decision to put me on the blue ribbon task force,” Peters said. “That’s an honor for NIU and our physicists.”

Republican Illinois House minority leader Tom Cross and state representative Bob Pritchard talked about the Argonne project with the media after a meet-and-greet session with the College Republicans Monday.

“A lot of this is about money,” Cross said. “We have some state money we are trying to tap into.”

Pritchard and Cross agreed that Peters was a good representative for Illinois regarding this project.

“NIU seems to be a great magnet for this kind of research,” Pritchard said. “Peters certainly understands that and, hopefully, with this project we will have an infrastructure to share the knowledge.”

Michigan State University and Argonne are both in the running for the accelerator project, which has been listed as high priority by the U.S. Department of Energy.

“It is an expensive machine,” said physics professor Courtlandt Bohn. “But some components of the machine have already been built.”

A decision on where the accelerator will be located should be made within the next year or two, Peters said.

If built in Illinois, the accelerator would most likely be built in the Lemont area, Bohn said.

“We have to make the case in Washington, and I’m sure I will be a part of that,” Peters said. “If we don’t get this, it won’t be because we didn’t try. I’m gonna try to do my part.”

MSU does have an accelerator lab built already, but would need a new facility to house the state-of-the-art machine.

The facility would potentially allow for faculty and students to be involved in the planning, research and development of the project, Bohn said.

The accelerator would be used to accelerate ions in a process used to study how stars burn their fuel.

“It pushes forward the next generation of science,” Peters said. “It will draw the best from the scientific community.”

The addition of a $1 billion accelerator could mean more joint programs with Argonne, including the addition of more teachers, Peters said.

“We’ll do everything we can to support Argonne, which has throughout its history been at the very cutting-edge of science,” Peters said. “We intend to apply our considerable resources and talents to the benefits of this proposal.”