MURA's first accelerator was a 45 MeV synchrotron, built in a concrete underground "vault", mostly for radiation protection purposes. A small electron storage ring, operating at 240 Mev, was designed by Ed Rowe and collaborators as a test facility to study high currents, and construction of this ring started in 1965. However, in 1963 President Johnson had decided that the next large accelerator facility would not be built at the MURA site, but in Batavia, Illinois; this became Fermilab. In 1967 MURA dissolved with the storage ring incomplete and with no further funding. The researchers, feeling teased by fate (and the government backers) named the machine after the mythological figure Tantalus, famed for his eternal punishment to stand beneath a fruit tree with the fruit ever eluding his grasp.