History
Most of the world's neutron sources were built decades ago, and although the uses and demand for neutrons have increased throughout the years, few new sources have been built. To fill that need for a new, improved neutron source, the DOE Office of Basic Energy Sciences funded the construction of SNS, which would provide the most intense pulsed neutron beams in the world for scientific research and industrial development.
The construction of SNS was a partnership of six DOE national laboratories: Argonne, Brookhaven, Lawrence Berkeley, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Jefferson. This collaboration was one of the largest of its kind in U.S. scientific history and was used to bring together the best minds and experience from many different fields.
After more than five years of construction and a cost of $1.4 billion, SNS was completed in April 2006. The first three instruments began commissioning and were available to the scientific community in August 2007. As of 2011, a total of 15 instruments have been completed, and SNS is hosting about 700 researchers per year.
Read more about this topic: Spallation Neutron Source
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The myth of independence from the mother is abandoned in mid- life as women learn new routes around the mother—both the mother without and the mother within. A mid-life daughter may reengage with a mother or put new controls on care and set limits to love. But whatever she does, her child’s history is never finished.”
—Terri Apter (20th century)
“It’s not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“We aspire to be something more than stupid and timid chattels, pretending to read history and our Bibles, but desecrating every house and every day we breathe in.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)