Winter 2002 -- vol. 20, no. 1 logos home page Contact the logos editor Argonne home page Feature articles Fermi facts, fables: Colleagues and friends share memories Researchers reach to the skies to reveal the secrets of the stars Passively safe reactors rely on nature to keep them cool Sidebar: What is a fast reactor? Enhanced IPNS to train Spallation Neutron Source user community Argonne Update Early Argonne reactor lit future of nuclear power industry Four Argonne materials scientists among world's most cited

Enhanced IPNS to train Spallation Neutron Source user community

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SNS instrument design at IPNS

Argonne's IPNS researchers are responsible for designing and building the SNS' main research instruments.

IPNS researchers provide hands-on training to the next generation of neutron researchers. IPNS scientist Evan Maxey (left) watches graduate students Quijuan Li (right) and Brian Newberry install a sample at the General Purpose Powder Diffractometer during the Third National School on Neutron and X-ray Scattering that was held at Argonne in 2001.

Since 1997, SNS instrument scientists have been working alongside Argonne experts to design and build the five initial neutron-scattering instruments for SNS. As SNS adds instruments, IPNS personnel may build and operate more instruments. Five other DOE national laboratories — Brookhaven, Thomas Jefferson, Lawrence Berkeley, Los Alamos and Oak Ridge — are building other SNS components.

DOE funded the first of two target stations for the SNS, the "high-power" target station. The National Science Foundation funded an effort to create a conceptual design of the second station, the long-wavelength target station. Carpenter, advisor to SNS for target systems development, and an IPNS target systems team devised the conceptual design of the long-wavelength target station, while IPNS instrument scientist Jim Richardson led a group of co-workers in its scattering instrument design.

Increased budget for more users

In addition to designing the SNS instruments, IPNS wants to be the training ground for the future SNS scientists. Toward this end, IPNS requested a budget increase for a facility upgrade.

Part of the money would go to capital improvements of IPNS, enhancing the neutron source by approximately 70 percent, Teller said. These improvements would help the IPNS' accelerator continue to operate at the 95 percent efficiency it has averaged since 1982. Even without these upgrades, IPNS' accelerator ran at 99.7 percent efficiency during September 2001, a feat no other neutron facility has ever matched.

Additional funding would support about 30 more scientific and technical personnel who would develop enhanced neutron-scattering instruments and perform experiments with these tools. With the added staff, the IPNS can host many more users. The extra support will help to double IPNS' scientific output and the number of users by the time the SNS opens in 2006.

IPNS would extend its current operating schedule from 25 weeks per year to 30 to accommodate more users.

"The SNS will be able to perform 10 times as many experiments as the IPNS," said Teller. "They'll want to host 2,000 users, but the current neutron user community is simply not sufficiently experienced to take advantage of this. We'd like to enhance our source to train the user community over the next five years so that the community is ready when the SNS starts up."

For more information, please contact Catherine Foster (630/252-5580 or cfoster@anl.gov) at Argonne.