Page 200 - Neutrons for Sciences and Society

Neutrons for Science
public spending reduced the budget of the SRC. Faced with a difficult situation which persisted after her departure in 1990,
the officials of the SRC (now SERC) studied their expenditure and came to the conclusion that Britain was spending too much money on neutrons. The majority of this sum of £ 22M was divided more or less equally between participation in the ILL
and the developments at the UK’s ISIS spallation source. Mick Lomer chaired a committee which was responsible for making cuts of about £ 5M in these costs. They came to the following conclusions: to reduce finance for ISIS would lead to the death
of the project so they proposed to reduce the participation in the ILL from 33 to 25%. This proposal was first announced at a press conference then presented to a meeting of the Steering Committee on 28 November 1991 in Grenoble. The announcement of the partial withdrawal of the British was not well received by the staff and management of the ILL. It came at a very bad time when the reactor was shut down and the partners were asking whether
it was necessary to carry out a reconstruction of the reactor. In
the press conference as well as in his statement110 to the Steering Committee the SERC representative, Ron Newport, made much of the fact that this decision was not connected to the reactor problems, though this was a little hard to believe. This did not prevent good relations being established between Newport and the ILL management.
The practical consequence was that the British contribution dropped from FF 100M in 1993 to FF 66M in 1994. This significant fall in budget was only slightly offset by a small increase of the contributions from the scientific associate countries
110 The original text is in appendix 6.
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