SCIENCE: Rising costs hamper mega–neutron beam facility

Description

Michael Preuss, a materials scientist at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom and chair of the ESS science advisory committee, describes the delay in full power as “a very sensible thing to do.” He would prefer to expand the number of instruments rather than boosting power early on. In any case, he maintains, improvements to the design of the machine’s moderators—devices needed to slow neutrons down to the speeds that make them useful for research—will yield a neutron flux that is “almost as high” at 2 MW as it would have been at 5 MW.