[Reblog]: Fate of Spanish Neutron Facility Up in the Air

2013-09-06 14:30

BARCELONA, SPAIN—Plans to build a particle accelerator and neutron source in Spain’s Basque Country have come to a sudden halt. The governing board of the European Spallation Source (ESS)-Bilbao has removed the project’s scientific director, Javier Bermejo, a neutron scattering researcher at the Institute for the Structure of Matter in Madrid, and did not renew the contract of ESS-Bilbao’s executive director, retiring physicist Joan Bordas. In a statement, the board said the facility needs “an analysis and new impetus.” The moves appear to mark another turning point in a long-standing debate over whether ESS-Bilbao should be a freestanding facility primarily serving Spain, or mostly an R&D test bed serving a Europe-wide spallation source set to be built in Sweden…

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