Page 172 - Neutrons for Sciences and Society

CHAPTER 7 Maturity
Maturity is a period of life during which one achieves maximum efficiency, but also when the first serious illnesses occur. For the ILL I would place this time between 1984 and 2005 as having these positive and negative signs of maturity. The number of users had grown greatly and hundreds of scientific publications resulted each year, but there was a progressive ageing of the irradiated reactor infrastructure to be accounted for one day. This would lead to long interruptions to the scientific measurements.
One of the positive aspects of this maturity is that the success of the ILL with an increasingly international character, has made Grenoble attractive to other multi-national organisations. The quality of the Université Joseph Fourier de Grenoble, the CNRS laboratories therein, and the CENG reinforce this attraction. A modern industrial base (Hewlett Packard, etc.) has evolved too, all contributing to the appeal of the city. The land ceded by the CENG for the ILL is sufficiently large to accommodate other international laboratories. Hence the arrival first of an outstation of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) then
the European Synchrotron Research Facility (ESRF). I will now describe briefly the evolution of these two institutes and what led to their being built on the ILL site. These establishments have transformed a space once completely empty before the advent of the ILL (Fig. 7.1) into a busy multi-laboratory site (Fig. 7.2).
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