Canadian Neutron Beam Centre to be closed in 2018

Impact

lack of infrastructure for public-interest science, funding shift from basic science to research that has potential for commercialization, brain drain

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Summary

Canada's leading-edge neutron beam research facility will be shut down in 2018, the federal government announced in February 2015. The Canadian Neutron Beam Centre (CNBC) "allows scientists to explore the structure and dynamics of materials down to atomic length scales. Materials can be studies that are of interest to scientists in many fields including materials science and engineering, physics, chemistry, earth science and biology," according to the Canadian Institute for Neutron Scattering. The neutron beam facility has been used for government and industrial research for decades. The beams are produced by the National Research Universal (NRU) reactor located at Canadian Nuclear Laboratories' Chalk River Laboratory in Chalk River, Ontario, which also produces most of the world's medical isotopes, used to treat cancer.

The CNBC had faced cuts in 2012 as part of reductions to funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council. NSERC's Major Resources Program, eliminated in 2012, had funded university researchers' access to CNBC, accounting for about 30% of CNBC's operating budget.

The cuts were criticized by many in the scientific community, including Dominic Ryan, head of the Canadian Institute for Neutron Scattering, which represents over 500 students and researches. Reacting to the government’s announcement, Ryan stated that if the cuts continue at their current pace, "eventually the whole thing comes down."

While CNBC's fate has been tied to problems with the aging NRU reactor, the physics community has proposed a replacement reactor, to be called the Canadian Neutron Centre, but the federal government's reaction has been to fund commercial ventures to replace the isotope supply, with no research component.