Page 34 - Neutrons for Sciences and Society

Neutrons for Science
power one can obtain an intense flux of neutrons during the short time the reactor is critical. The European project I was describing, named SORA, was under development through Euratom by a team led by Walter Kley. With a nominal power of 1 MW and a peak power of 300 MW it would give rise to a maximum flux of 4x1015 neutrons/cm2/s. We will see later how these peak fluxes are best used. There were hence appealing aspects in this project.
Euratom, created in 1957, had two main objectives: ensuring the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, and to work on the creation of a civil nuclear industry in Europe. These themes were thus essentially technical and political. However Euratom decided to create a joint research centre devoted, at least partially, to basic research. Ispra in northern Italy was chosen for this research centre. Within this framework, the SORA project, typical of fundamental research, proceeded. It was never constructed, but at the time it aroused great interest in the scientific community, and made it necessary to compare the merits of the high flux reactor and a pulsed reactor. The comparison was made difficult because there was no experience with pulsed reactors in western Europe. In November 1964 I went to Dubna for a visit of ten days. My conclusions were as follows:
“The range of applications of a pulsed pile like SORA is
more limited than a reactor at constant high flux. For certain experiments the possibilities are much bigger; this is the case for nuclear physics. In inelastic scattering of cold neutrons, and for a fraction of diffraction experiments the pulsed pile will give better results than a static pile. Another important aspect is that a static reactor with a flux of 1015 is at the limits of technical
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