Oak Ridge Electron Linear Accelerator

The ORELA is a powerful electron accelerator-based neutron source located in the Physics Division of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It produces intense, nanosecond bursts of neutrons, each burst containing neutrons with energies from 10e-03 to 10e08 eV. ORELA is operated about 1200 hours per year and is an ORNL User Facility open to university, national laboratory and industrial scientists. The mission of ORELA has changed from a recent focus on applied research to nuclear astrophysics. This is an area in which ORELA has historically been very productive: most of the measurements of neutron capture cross sections necessary for understanding heavy element nucleosynthesis through the slow neutron capture process (s-process) have been made at ORELA.