Page 77 - A Life - my Live - my path

My career - the IRE

your office. You weren't there, but a lady answered: "Mr
Engineer isn't in his office".
My mother added: "How nice to hear that".
I think she must have quantified the effort my parents had
to make and the result they achieved. Ovidio, who looked
after the goats and sheep at San Giovanni Lipioni, was
known as an "Engineer".
I had the deep feeling that, for that very special little
moment, I had created a bit of happiness.
To live is to feel!

6.2 Cyclotron department
From 1975 to 1981, I worked on various projects (smoke

detectors, water leak detectors in concrete-lined pipes,
detection of the seabed in the port of Zeebrugge and in the
Gironde estuary). Generally speaking, it went well. I was
diligent, I prepared my meetings well and I conveyed a
positive image.
After many years of political negotiations, and a visit to a
Japanese centre by the Director General accompanied by
several IRE managers in 1981, the decision was made: the
IRE could build the industrial environment needed to
produce radioactive elements from a cyclotron .
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The planned budget was one billion Belgian francs (€25m).
The cyclotron is a particle (proton) accelerator. When they
reach a certain velocity (e=mc², i.e. energy), they are projected

68 Ernest Orlando LAWRENCE: American physicist from the University of
California at Berkeley. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939 for the
invention of the cyclotron in 1931.
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