paris

French plans to build a new national synchrotron are likely to be approved after next month's regional elections, according to several sources in the synchrotron user community. Plans for the 2.15 GeV Soleil synchrotron, which will cost FFr1 billion (US$ 160 million), were suspended last year by the Socialist government.

Yves Farge, a former ministerial adviser and currently head of research at Pechiney, is resigning to become head of a joint commission between the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), the Centre National de la Recherche (CNRS) and the ministry to consider synchrotron radiation in France. Eventually, it is believed, he will head the Soleil project.

Soleil is intended to replace the ageing Lure facilities near Paris, of which Farge was the founder, which has 800 MeV and 1.85 GeV synchrotrons.

The new synchrotron facility has received the backing of Catherine Bréchignac, the director general of CNRS, and Yannick d'Escatha, director general of CEA. But to the dismay of many scientists, the scheme was frozen in November by Claude Allègre, the minister for national education, research and technology, as part of a review of spending on ‘big science’ (see Nature 390, 212; 1997).

Allègre said at the time that large facilities could only be run economically if they were in operation for 24 hours a day, as was the case for international facilities but not national ones. The creation of the latter, he declared would “become the exception”. For this reason, he said, the Soleil project would be made “dormant”, although not cancelled as such.

But many scientists criticized the decision as being out of touch with the “huge demand” in many research communities. They pointed out that the Soleil project design explicitly specifies that it will operate 24 hours a day, and that synchrotrons are not big equipment used by a few, but a shared tool used by many disciplines.

The underlying reasons for the delay seem to be political, however. Allègre is said to have been keen to avoid taking a decision on the location of the synchrotron — 42 towns have applied to host the facility — until after next month's regional elections.

According to several scientists, a decision to approve Soleil will be announced at that point. Recent statements by Allègre have suggested that his own preference for the location of the machine is in the Paris region, where existing facilities are concentrated.