Thursday 10 May 2012

More on recent NSERC cuts to Canadian Neutron Beam Centre

This is the link to the write up about the recent NSERC cuts to Canadian Neutron Beam Centre at a local newspaper: http://www.northrenfrewtimes.com/nrc-unit-faces-budget-cut/ "The Canadian Neutron Beam Centre (CNBC) is operated by the National Research Council (NRC) at Chalk River.
However, the program also receives about 30 per cent of its operating funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC).
Officials learned last week that, faced with cuts in the 2012 federal budget, NRSERC is cancelling the Major Resource Support program that provides the funding to the CNBC as well as other facilities across Canada.
NSERC funding is intended to support basic science research at the university level, and the money provided to CNBC – roughly $1.5 million a year – supports the program to allow university-based researchers to access “beam time” at the NRU reactor.
Dominic Ryan is a professor at McGill University and president of the Canadian Institute for Neutron Scattering (CINS), which represents over 500 researchers and students who make up the neutron-beam community.
Ryan said he learned that the funding for the CNBC would be cancelled early last week.
“To hear that we were getting gutted like that was quite a shock,” he said.
“It’s not a good week.”
Ryan said the loss of the funding represents “another step down” in the level of basic science research being done at Chalk River, with the government “chipping away” at its support for the science community.
“If you chip away enough, eventually the whole thing comes down,” he said."

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