Page 27 - Neutrons for Sciences and Society

Chapter 1 - Pre-history
our British colleagues were certainly the most advanced, at least in Europe, in this domain of applications of neutron scattering, thanks to scientists like Peter Egelstaff, Ray Lowde, John White, William (Bill) Mitchell, etc. As representatives of Germany, Maier-Leibnitz and Joachim Pretsch, the German minister for research, participated in this meeting in which it was decided to appoint a committee of experts chosen from the future users of the envisaged high flux reactor.
Even in 1962, i.e. before operations of the Brookhaven reactor,
a British study had produced a firm proposal for building an HFBR at Harwell20, an important laboratory of the UKAEA21
near Oxford. This document presented three options: the first
was a pure and simple copy of the reactor in construction at Brookhaven. The second option was a small modification to this reactor to include a cold source and a hot source to maximise fluxes locally of long and short wavelength neutrons respectively. These depended on Brookhaven sending all its designs to Harwell. The third option which was the most developed in the report is
for a British designed reactor for which further complementary studies would be necessary.
For this last choice the investment was priced at £6.76M (equivalent to about €161M in 2018) and 63 months would be needed for design and construction. A cold source and a hot source were planned. The cold source was to use liquid hydrogen (170 g) which limited its performance compared to a source using liquid deuterium as is used at the ILL. It appears that this choice was made deliberately to reduce the volume of the cold source which would minimise heating of the source by radiation from the
20 Crocker V.S., Halliday D.B., Wade B.O., Jackson E.M., Forgan R., High Flux Beam Reactor report, (1962) AERE M 1123.
21 UKAEA : United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority.
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