Legitimizing ESS: Big Science as a Collaboration Over Boundaries - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 9187351102 ISBN 13: 9789187351105

Publisher: Nordic Academic Press, 2013

Synopsis

'Big Science' is a broad epithet that can be associated with research projects as different as the Manhattan Project, the Hubble Telescope-construction, and the CERN-establishment in Geneva. While the science produced by these projects is vastly different, they have in common the fact that they all involve huge budgets, big facilities, complex instrumentation, years of planning, and large multidisciplinary teams of researchers. In this book the authors examine the complexity of the cultural, social, and political processes from which and in which Big Science develops. They do so by focusing upon the planning and development of the European Spallation Source, ESS, that is to be located in Lund in southern Sweden. Together, the chapters represent a variety of perspectives to highlight the complexity of the processes that are integral to Big Science. Thus, this volume examines the very different roles Big Science may be given in different contexts: locally, regionally, nationally and internationally, as well as historically. The book is based on the research of scholars based at Lund University from the disciplines of archive and library sciences, art history and visual studies, ethnology, gender studies, geography, history of ideas and sciences, media and communication, philosophy, and policy research.

About this title

About the Author

Thomas Kaiserfeld is a professor of history of ideas and sciences at Lund University after having been a professor of history of science and technology at KTH, Stockholm. His research focus is longer historical perspectives such as the founding of different organizations over the past three to four centuries for the transfer of knowledge and research result to users.

Tom O’Dell is a professor of ethnology in the department of arts and cultural sciences at Lund University. His research has primarily focused on two areas of study: mobility and the cultural economy. He has often united these two areas of interest through the study of tourism and leisure practices.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Legitimizing ESS

Big Science as a collaboration across boundaries

By Thomas Kaiserfeld, Tom O'Dell

Nordic Academic Press

Copyright © 2013 Nordic Academic Press and the authors
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-91-87351-10-5

Contents

Introduction. The European Spallation Source Big Science in a small Swedish university town Thomas Kaiserfeld & Tom O'Dell, 
1. The ESS from neutron gap to global strategy Plans for an international research facility after the cold war Thomas Kaiserfeld, 
2. Myths and realities of the ESS project A systematic scrutiny of readily accepted 'truths' Olof Hallonsten, 
3. Mobile spaces of affect A cultural history of the future Tom O'Dell, 
Colour section 1, 
4. The ESS in the local news media Expectations, investigations, and mobilization Tobias Linné, 
5. The ESS and the geography of innovation Josephine V. Rekers, 
6. Reaching the inside from the outside? Member identification and auto-communication during organizational transition Sara von Platen, 
7. Social media and research practices in Big Science The example of MAX-lab Birgitta G. Olander, 
8. Designing for the future Scientific instruments as technical objects in experimental systems Kerstin Sandell, 
9. Believing in the ESS Scale, vision, and pioneering Max Liljefors, 
Colour section 2, 
10. Technoscience comes to Lund The ESS and the Enlightenment vision Victoria Höög, 
11. The momentum of maturity What to do with ageing Big Science facilities Gustav Holmberg, 
About the authors, 

CHAPTER 1

The ESS from neutron gap to global strategy

Plans for an international research facility after the cold war

Thomas Kaiserfeld

This is a story of planning, and arguing about, an international European research facility after the end of the cold war; or perhaps rather a sketch of the background to the project, running through the different interests and parties that supported it as well as the obstacles thrown in its path by everything from grudging American colleagues to the national priorities of the European states involved. What were the arguments presented in scientific and political circles for building a new neutron source, and what were the main fears among those who opposed this endeavour? That is the simple empirical question that the following article will elucidate.

All the shifting arguments presented here must not stand in the way of the reasons most frequently presented in the context of ESS, namely those aimed at policy-makers and a wider lay audience, explaining its usefulness in a number of industrial sectors (ESS 1997; ESS 2002). The uses presented there differ from one document to the next, but there are usually about ten different fields of investigation listed that would benefit tremendously from the realization of a more intense spallation neutron source. Among the most commonly named applications are those within materials science, the environmental sciences, nanotechnology, biology, biotechnology, and medicine. There is also mention of the potential contributions to sciences such as chemistry and particle physics. Leaving aside these well-worn arguments, however, I will concentrate on scrutinizing the arguments used in policy contexts.

The problem of the background of ESS can be connected to current research on the international politics of science and technology in the context of very large research facilities. From this point of view it is easy to understand the idea of the ESS as a reaction to the American reconstruction of science in Europe during the cold war. During this period, the US managed to secure scientific and technological leadership by shaping the practices and institutions in Western Europe through a management of control by sharing and denying access to information that still persists (Krige 2006; Krige 2010). I will here try to contrast the view of American information hegemony with scientific internationalism and military isolationism stretching beyond the cold war into the twenty-first century, showing how relations in the area of neutron science created both conflict and cooperation in the decade following the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989. Especially interesting here are the arguments between Europeans and Americans, such as the one in the mid-1990s regarding free access to research facilities and the possibility of open-door policies.

Neutron science is an especially rewarding field from this point of view because of its transformation starting in the 1970s from a research area with clear military and nuclear power applications, reliant on experiments using neutrons from fission reactors, to one of a more heterogeneous character with industrial applications ranging from materials science to biology. This trend towards widening applicability became increasingly important in different campaigns for the building of new neutron sources during the cold war, a shift away from military applications that marked science policies more generally (Elzinga 2012). The arguments in favour of the new facilities were boosted further with the introduction of a new type of neutron sources technique in Japan, the US, and the UK using spallation. This dual transformation, on the one hand from military and energy applications to a broader set of industrially relevant uses and, on the other hand, from a parasitic dependence on experimental fission reactors to the opportunity to use custom-built pulsed spallation sources, did indeed lead to strained relations between American and European neutron scientists in the mid-1990s, when the anticipated so called neutron gap sharpened competition.

The changes in the use of particle accelerators and other instruments have been studied in many different contexts and from many different angles. Best known is perhaps Peter Galison's analysis of how twentieth-century physics was transformed from individual effort to collective projects involving instrumentation makers, theorists, and experimentalists who coordinated machines, evidence, and arguments (Galison 1997). It is no surprise that the concept of trading zones became important as a way to frame the dynamics.

In this context, however, a more recently described transformation is even more relevant, namely how accelerator-based science has shifted focus from particle physics to materials science to biological applications. This change matched one in how technical knowledge claims were implicated in modes of authority, access, and control, together defining the epistemic-political order (Westfall 2008; Doing 2009). In essence, instruments producing subatomic particles were less and less used to gather data about the particles themselves and more and more used to produce particles that were used to gather data about other things such as materials or proteins. The primary research object was no longer the particles themselves, but the different materials and things they were directed at; a change brought about in part by the necessary search for user support when mobilizing scientific backing for the funding of large and expensive research facilities.

The consequences are that large-scale research facilities usually rely on arguments that reveal their primary function to be supplying imagined or real 'users' with instruments to access data and generate knowledge (Davenport et al. 2003). Many of the arguments in favour of building the ESS are indeed based on the potential applications of its findings, and the ESS and similar international facilities can be understood as examples of hybrid research organizations, with all that means in terms of the specific demands placed on them (Miller 2001).

Clearly, international Big Science has developed into a broad field of study over the past fifty years. Among the array of pertinent problems are instrumentation and scientific collaborations in complex policy contexts, symbolic values and specific research styles, the impact of commercial interests and economic development, and the assimilation of research traditions in Big Science environments (Hermann et al. 1987–96; Strasser 2011). The notion of Big Science, with resources funnelled into the knowledge generation's large projects, has also been altered, leading to new concepts such as Megascience, a term for ventures demanding resources and formal management structures that can only be supplied through the cooperation between a number of organizations such as universities, research agents and governments, not seldom based in different countries (Blanpied & Bond 1993). And it is a striving for cooperation more than anything else that characterizes the policy contexts of the efforts to launch the ESS.

Parasitic research

After the fall of the Iron Curtain, the idea was first mooted of pooling European resources to build a new spallation source more powerful than anything that existed at the time. The power of the beam would be crucial, since it resulted in more neutrons per pulse. Bringing in different laboratories and partner countries, the plan was truly Megascience, and typical of the early 1990s, when there were a number of initiatives discussed and reviewed for the construction of the 'next generation' of neutron sources.

Neutron physics after the Second World War was based on the development of techniques for studying materials through neutron diffraction — something that became more common in the 1950s when nuclear reactors made thermal neutron sources with higher flux available (Mason 2006). During the 1950s and 1960s, neutron science was to a large extent 'a parasitic activity at nuclear reactors', and involved only a small number of researchers (Pynn & Fender 1985, 47). The groups were relatively isolated from both the academic and industrial communities, and did primarily solid-state physics in an environment of their own: this at least is how members of the neutron science community themselves saw their own situation in hindsight.

In the 1970s, however, conditions changed as different national neutron research facilities opened up to foreign scientists. There was also quite a lot of effort put in to circumventing the limitations of the existing fission reactors, primarily their low efficiency in producing low-energy neutrons (which are better suited for probing materials) and their uncontrolled neutron flux (Westfall 2010). The development of new, pulsed neutron sources in the late 1970s made neutron scattering a more common technique to study the structural and dynamic characteristics of materials. By the mid-1980s, there were some fifteen research reactors available as neutron sources for research purposes in Western Europe. However, these types of neutron sources had limits to the flux of thermal neutrons, and in the mid-1970s, the construction of pulsed spallation sources had begun in the US, resulting in facilities in Japan and the US that became fully operational in 1980 and 1981 respectively. The first European spallation source to be constructed was the ISIS neutron spallation facility run by the Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory (RAL) at Harwell, south of Oxford, which opened in 1985 as the world's then most powerful spallation neutron source. As was said at the time, 'Neutron scattering in Europe appears set to flourish for the rest of the century' (Pynn & Fender 1985, 48).

Only a year later, in 1986, the Commission of the European Communities (CEC) Large Facilities Panel recommended a study of future spallation sources in Europe. In its report in 1990, the Neutron Study Panel suggested a more detailed design study along these lines in order to keep European neutron research at the forefront (Taylor 1995). Not to lose the initiative, the Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory (running ISIS) and the German Forschungszentrum Jülich (running a research reactor close to the Dutch and Belgian borders) joined forces and arranged a number of meetings in 1991 and 1992 to explore options for an advanced high-power accelerator-driven pulsed spallation source, in the process attracting the interest of laboratories in another six European countries (ESS 2001a). In mid-1993, the ESS Council was formed with representatives from these countries and observers from France and Spain — most of the EC member states that relied on nuclear power.

'We need more neutrons!'

The same year also saw initiatives from the European Science Foundation (ESF) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the latter running a Megascience Forum in 1992–5, which in 1993 formed a working group on neutron sources that met in Denmark, and where the ESS Council participated through its member states together with representatives from eighteen countries (Richter & Springer 1998, 7). Doubtless, the forming of the Megascience Forum was both a reaction to the Big Science trend for ever-larger and more expensive instruments as well as an expression of the high hopes for greater international research cooperation after the fall of the Iron Curtain. One conclusion among European policy-makers in the early 1990s was that 'International competition has been one of the main drivers of Big Science' (Smith 1993, 10). In contrast, it was also noted that 'Now that East-West tensions are being relaxed, it can be hoped that Big Science cooperation can be inaugurated with the republics of the former USSR, whose scientists constitute a considerable intellectual resource' (Praderie 1993, 35).

In the OECD Megascience Forum, the conclusion was that Big Science, too often meaning Big Money and Big Machines, needed to be transformed to enable research that 'addresses a set of scientific problems of such significance, scope, and complexity as to require an unusually large-scale collaborative effort' (Blanpied & Bond 1993, 42). This idea was then repeated over the years. At this point, there were still only four spallation sources in operation in the world, two in the US, one in the UK, and one in Japan (Riste 1993). In order to change the situation, two main recommendations were formulated in 1993: increased international collaboration, both as a need and as an opportunity, and a dual strategy to encourage investment in new and existing facilities as well as increased access to them (OECD 1995).

This can be contrasted with the state of affairs only a year later when the situation seemed less clear regarding the need for different types of facilities. The large number of different neutron sources, twenty-two in Europe, of which six were seen as major ones, and another six in the US, made the situation complicated. The ques tion was raised as to whether Europe could continue to operate all twenty-two facilities (OECD 1995, 33–4), casting doubt on whether scientists and decision-makers were correct about the actual shortage of neutrons, the prospects of global co-ordination and cooperation (with the ESS as an example), and the prospects for global funding.

In essence, the idea of cooperating to build facilities had been transformed into cooperating to use facilities and a critique of userpay systems of management. These different views on priorities also separated the European standpoint from the American, with European neutron researchers complaining that 'The U.S. wants to establish an open-door policy, but access to U.S. installations is not always so open. ... Reciprocal free access for neutrons is not a good deal for us' (Clery & Lawler 1995, 953). Europeans discarded the idea of the allocation of time at neutron research facilities based exclusively on peer-reviewed applications, since they did not trust the Americans to launch a corresponding system for access to their facilities. Mutual mistrust threatened to harm research communities in both Europe and America in the mid-1990s, to the extent that action was finally taken to come to some sort of agreement. In the end, the OECD Megascience Forum's Working Group on Neutron Sources managed to please both camps by suggesting the maintenance and refurbishment of existing national neutron sources as well as maximizing the use of front-rank facilities and informing governments about future proposals for large regional neutron sources like the ESS.

In Europe, it was primarily the physical limits of the neutron sources (together with the argument that many of the European neutron sources were getting old, approaching the end of their technical and economic viability, and that a 'neutron gap' or 'neutron drought' was looming) that provided the drive for new and ambitious designs for the future (see Figure 1) (Riste 1993; ESF 2000, 7). Concerns among researchers about diminishing access to neutron sources were compounded by calculations that pointed to an increase in the number of European neutron beam users, making the situation even more urgent (Riste 1993, 80–1). In reality, the projected decline proved correct until the mid-2000s, but after that, the predicted decrease was halted due to the building of new sources and the upgrading of existing ones. Thus, the projections made in the mid-1990s proved correct in the short run — meaning a decade — but wrong in the end. This argument for building a new neutron source was duly dropped during the first decade of the twenty-first century.

In addition to the rhetoric of the anticipated 'neutron gap', there was another rhetorical trope based on the notion that fission reactors were reaching their practical limits as neutron sources. Even if they could be improved and efficiency raised with respect to neutrons generated, it was not possible to increase significantly the reactors' output. Instead, the OECD and others claimed that more powerful spallation sources would lead 'to a quantum leap in neutron science' (Richter 2002, 818). The hopes pinned on the spallation sources as a conceptual design is captured in the recurring use of the term 'third-generation neutron source' in the 1990s — the idea being that there had been a first generation consisting of enriched radioactive isotopes, and a second generation consisting of fission reactors, with more powerful spallation sources as the third generation. This idea of three successive generations of neutron sources constituted a strong argument for the necessity, the inevitability even, of supporting and building a new facility that could be seen as a further step in the progressive development of more and more powerful spallation sources. By presenting the generations of neutron sources diagrammatically (as in Figure 2), stronger spallation sources seemed virtually predestined, and it became more a matter of where than of when. Quite clearly, Europe was a potential location.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Nordic Academic Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9187351102
• ISBN 13: 9789187351105
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240
• Editor: Kaiserfeld Thomas