Science: Three cities vying to host a €1 billion neutron beam research center called the European Spallation Source (ESS) last week submitted bids to a specially created, independent panel of "wise people." "Rational criteria are better than the handshake of two powerful people," says Colin Carlile of Lund University in Sweden, director of the ESS-Scandinavia consortium.
Early in the decade the ESS project foundered and its central project office closed in 2003 due to a lack of political will to get the facility constructed. Meanwhile, the United States built the Spallation Neutron Source in Tennessee, and Japan built a source as part of its nearly complete J-PARC facility at Tokai.
ESS was given new impetus by the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI), a body tasked by the European Union with drawing up a list of planned large facilities that EU nations should work together on.
ESS was one of 35 projects in the first ESFRI road map released in 2006. Three cities were soon vying to host ESS--Lund in Sweden, Bilbao in Spain, and Debrecen in Hungary--and seeking allies. The Lund team is building an alliance of five Scandinavian nations, the three Baltic states, and Poland. Debrecen is working on its central European neighbors (including Poland) as well as Russia. And the Debrecen and Bilbao teams pledged to support each other should one of them have a face-off with Lund.
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