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Nuclear physicists have lost the battle to save the Nuclear Structure
Facility at Daresbury, Cheshire. The Science and Engineering Research Council
has failed in its long search for a way out of its financial problems and
has decided to close the NSF at the end of next year.

‘Our community is shocked,’ said Bill Gelletley, director of the NSF,
when the decision was announced last week. ‘People are calling in now and
they are upset.’

British research at the NSF, recognised by the SERC as a world-beating
instrument, could start winding down in as little as two weeks. In the financial
year starting next month the SERC has money to maintain the particle collider
and pay salaries, but no money for research.

The research council is still looking for research funds, but it could
end up paying £5 million next year to keep open a facility that only
foreign scientists would have the money to use.

‘Only minimal provision has been made for the operation of the NSF in
1991/92,’ said the SERC.

Nuclear physicists were looking forward to a review of the NSF after
months of doubt during which the fortunes of the facility see-sawed. In
January, the Nuclear Physics Board of the SERC recommended closing the NSF.
At the start of February, Mark Richmond, chairman of the SERC, said he would
seek extra funds for the NSF and announced a review of nuclear physics which
would consider the future of the facility. Now he has shocked nuclear physicists
by deciding that the review will go ahead, but without the NSF. Gelletley
said: ‘The decision to close should only take place after a review.’

Gelletley says Alan Howarth, the science minister, confirmed that the
review would consider the NSF when he visited Daresbury last month. But
Howarth’s department says he always insisted the reivew was a matter for
the SERC.

The SERC says that it received only a 3 per cent rise in its funding
this year and blames the decision to close the NSF now on the financial
rules laid down by the Advisory Board for the Research Councils over the
past month. ‘Events have moved on,’ said a spokesman. ‘We have a budget
which is set for the next four years. We have to keep within that budget
and we have to decide how to do that now.’

The ABRC has been trying to increase the amount of money available for
grants to individual researchers. In advice to the government last December,
the chairman of the ABRC, David Phillips, urged further reduction in the
proportion of the SERC’s budget spent on ‘big science’.

Gelletley asks why, if the NSF is to be kept open till the end of 1992,
it cannot be reviewed during that time. He says nuclear physics in Britain
will be left with only a couple of million pounds. ‘An old guy like me could
potter about on that,’ he says. ‘But you could not lead the research.’