Page 83 - Neutrons for Sciences and Society

Chapter 4 - The negotiations
Technically it is easier to use light water as coolant in a swimming pool reactor. For this reason, and based on experience with the SILOE reactor, the CENG tried to impose the choice
of light water cooling. Beckurts was in favour of the heavy
water option, supported by Kouts and Dautray. The difficulty for implementing the latter was further complicated by the wish of the future users to have demountable beam tubes so that the reactor configuration and experiments were not fixed for all time. This required designing joints with seals to provide the necessary water tightness, though both water circuits were at atmospheric pressure. Our Brookhaven friends thought that this disassembly would be unachievable.
A conference was held 19-23 September 1966 at Santa Fe (New Mexico, USA) by the American Atomic Energy Commission66. Various possibilities for intense neutron sources were compared there, including continuous reactors, pulsed reactors and sources not employing fission. In an introductory review Robert Dautray presented all high flux reactors then in operation (Brookhaven HFBR), under construction or consideration (Oak Ridge HFIR irradiation reactor, the British project, and the Franco-German project at Grenoble), and the experiment of operating one of
the reactors at Savannah River temporarily at high flux. This comparison showed up the limitations of continuous reactors; each of these was then presented in detail. The future ILL project was presented by Robert Dautray and Karl Beckurts; the two water options had been compared. In their conclusions they noted:
66 “Intense Neutron Sources: Proceedings of a United States Atomic Energy Commission/European Nuclear En- ergy Agency Seminar”, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 19-23 September 1966; CONF-660925. Physics TID-4500.
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