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History
Beginnings
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1945: ZEEP
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1947: NRX
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1957: NRU
1994: Nobel Prize
<h2>1994: The Nobel Prize</h2> <p>When world class facilities are available then creative minds are able to use them to achieve remarkable things. Ask any craftsman: tools are important. Because the NRX and NRU reactors were built in Canada, isotopes were first used in cancer treatment here, and today Canada has the largest medical isotope industry in the world.</p> <p>In the 1950s Bert Brockhouse at Chalk River and Cliff Shull in the USA, pioneered a new field of science, using neutrons to investigate material properties at an atomic scale. They could do that because of the intense beams of neutrons from the NRX and NRU reactors, and their counterparts in the USA. By 1994 the technique was practiced on every continent, and demand for neutrons outstripped the available time at facilities world-wide. For their pioneering work Brockhouse and Shull were awarded the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physics.</p> <p>The press release from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1994 read:</p> <p>"Press Release: The 1994 Nobel Prize in Physics</p> <p>12 October 1994</p> <p>The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physics for pioneering contributions to the development of neutron scattering techniques for studies of condensed matter with one half to Professor Bertram N. Brockhouse, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, for the development of neutron spectroscopy<br> and one half to Professor Clifford G. Shull, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA for the development of the neutron diffraction technique"</p>
