The Associated Press reported that the $1.4 billion Spallation Neutron Source facility at Oak Ridge, TN, has established a new mark as the world's most powerful accelerator-based source of neutrons for scientific research.

SNS's neutron beam reached 183 kilowatts on Aug. 11, surpassing the 163-kilowatt record held by the ISIS facility at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, England. According to AP, Oak Ridge officials said their accelerator is designed to produce up to 10 times more neutrons than now.

Neutron scattering, discovered at Oak Ridge in the 1940s, is an important tool for studying how materials are made so that they can be improved upon. Oak Ridge Lab Director Thom Mason compared the SNS to a "very fancy microscope for seeing how atoms are put together, one at a time, in order to make some material that has some desired property. It might be a protein. It might be some magnetic material.". To do that, "you need a very bright source in order to see fine details. The power level that we operate at tells us how bright our light bulb is."

So why does the AFT Pipeline care about this? Well, besides simply being a fascinating science story, AFT Impulse was used to model transient flow in the liquid mercury loop used as the neutron source. With a specific gravity of more than 10, fluid inertia effects are an order of magnitude greater than most piping systems with a comensurate increase in the potential for transient problems. UT Battelle modeled the mercury loop in AFT Impulse to develop a design that successfully avoids waterhammer and surge problems.