Munich

Peter Tindemans: forced to halt neutron project. Credit: ESS CENTRAL PROJECT TEAM

Plans for the European Spallation Source (ESS) — a state-of-the-art facility for neutron science — are near to collapse this week, after Germany and Britain indicated that they would not support its construction.

Germany's research minister Edelgard Bulmahn was expected to tell the country's cabinet this week that investment in the €1.4-billion (US$1.5-billion) facility would put too much strain on Germany's science budget. And last month, says Dieter Richter, scientific director of the ESS project, Britain quietly revoked support for it at a research infrastructure meeting in Brussels.

The ESS, which was first proposed more then ten years ago, was to be the most powerful neutron source in the world. An estimated 5,000 European scientists use neutrons to observe the detailed molecular structure of everything from plastics to proteins.

But a leaked document from a meeting last month of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures states that “there is not sufficient support from among the Member States” for the realization of the ESS.

As a result of these developments, the ESS project team will be dissolved later this year, says Peter Tindemans, chairman of the ESS Council. “It makes no sense, under the current circumstances, to carry on with technology development,” he says.

The decision is a crippling blow for an area of science in which Europe has long excelled. “Even US science advisers admit that Europe has global leadership in neutron research,” says Richter. “Without the ESS we will soon lose it to Japan and the United States, which are both building and upgrading powerful neutron facilities.”

The last hope for the project is that a scaled-down version might be built with financial support from one of the regions that applied to host the original facility. A former airfield near Selby, UK, and a greenfield site in Sachsen-Anhalt, eastern Germany, had been selected as potential sites, and both regions may continue to push for the construction of a neutron source.

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