IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Keckwick Lane, WARRINGTON, WA4 4AD

For scientists arriving by boat?

Dating from the 1970s, this tower was mothballed in 1993, but is now being used for research into the "fourth generation light source". This follows the Government's decision to site the third generation Diamond Synchrotron facility in Oxfordshire.

A view across the experimental hall of the SRS at Daresbury Lab a few months before its final decommissioning. Synchrotrons like this one are bright x-ray sources with variable energy, used for experiments in biology, materials science, chemistry, physics, geology and archaeology. Scientists travel to these facilities to set up their experiments during an allocated time slot (typically a few days at a time), sharing the beamlines and other infrastructure provided by the lab. The SRS was the first synchrotron worldwide that was dedicated for generating x-rays - older synchrotrons were particle physics experiments where the x-rays generated as a by-product were only used 'parasitically' by materials scientists. The SRS has been operational from 1981 till 2008 and has now come to the end of its useful life. The UK's replacement facility is Diamond Light Source Image at Harwell in Oxfordshire, which enables faster and more diverse experiments. The UK also has a share in the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility at Grenoble in the French Alps.