Big Milestone for my Facility!

[IROC]

After about 3 years of operation, we achieved over 1 Megawatt of proton beam power today. Huge milestone as this represents a beam power of about 6 times that of any other facility of this kind.

Big day for science geeks. Screen shots from our control system:

[livi]

Thats brilliant, Mike! Congratulations!

I have not the foggiest what you are referring to, on account of my general stupidity, but you being a highly intelligent gentleman, I am certain this is progress of paramount importance! Good for you!

[RPKESQ]

Superb work Mike! Keep up the good work of pushing the darkness back. Make sure your coworkers know there are people who really appreciate what they do.

[IROC]

From the lower screen shot above (in the lower, right hand corner) you can see that we are delivering 1.1 x 10^14 protons per pulse. At 60 Hz (60 pulses per second) that's alot of protons.

[Jim Richards]

You could do better with a Cool Collar.







Great work Mike!

[Gogar]

That's awesome, Mike!

I think that's just about the maximum output of my Federation-issued Phaser.

[Porsche-O-Phile]

Something to do with lasers?

Is this "Star Wars" stuff to shoot down missiles or whatever?

[GG Allin]

Careful where you point that thing.

[IROC]

Originally Posted by Porsche-O-Phile

Something to do with lasers?

Is this "Star Wars" stuff to shoot down missiles or whatever?

Nope, more of a Large Hadron Collider "light". We take a proton beam accelerated to about 90% of the speed of light and slam it into a liquid mercury "target" and produce neutrons for fundamental physics research, material science, nanophase material science, etc. Basically a $1.5 billion neutron factory.

The size of our beam is much larger than the LHC (ours is roughly 200mm x 70mm where their's is about the size of a pencil) but their's is at a higher power. Here's some info FWIW:

http://neutrons.ornl.gov/aboutsns/aboutsns.shtml

It's actually one of the coolest placest in the world. The amount of technology is staggering. It is actually amazing that it even works.

If the beam could be steered and "fired" like a phaser, it would do some serious damage. We just replaced our "target" a couple of weeks ago (that was my job). Here's a local newspaper article (I'm the guy pointing at the monitor):

http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2009/jul/21/sns-replaces-key-component/

[Pazuzu]

Is 1Mwatt your injection power, or after you've spun it around a bit?

Ah, after looking at your link, it appears to be the power that is striking the target. Come talk to me when you have an injection power that high

[Porsche-O-Phile]

Very cool stuff - are you working on the same kind of stuff that CERN is hoping to do with their collider? That one's been getting all the press lately (because it's huge, expensive and should be coming on line very soon after they fix a couple of magnets that went bad IIRC...)

[gassy]

You gotta figure out how to channel that through your finger dude.

[gtc]

Holy crap, that's a lot of mercury!

[IROC]

Originally Posted by gtc

Holy crap, that's a lot of mercury!

Yep, highly radioactive mercury to make it even nastier. During operation, the mercury has been reading about 10,000 R/hr.

[tabs]

Really interesting....Whats going to be the max you ramp that beocth up to. At some point you are going to aim that thing and stuff is really going to start spewing off protons.

I would hate to be the one to have to pay that electric bill...

[Don Plumley]

ORNL - That's cool. Are you using HTS magnets?

I've been working with Bill Schwenterly on a couple of 2G HTS proposals. Do you know Mark Carter?

[IROC]

Originally Posted by Pazuzu

Is 1Mwatt your injection power, or after you've spun it around a bit?

Ah, after looking at your link, it appears to be the power that is striking the target. Come talk to me when you have an injection power that high

The beam is at full power before it reaches the ring, so our "injection" point is essentially 1 MW. Our "ring" is not a cyclotron, it merely accumulates protons and chops them into pulses before they are extracted and sent to the target. Now, if you're talking about our ion source (the "front end" in the above picture) then, no, we're no where near 1 MW.

As for the LHC, we actually had some similar problems to what they experienced and some folks from here went over and helped them out with their magnet issues.

[IROC]

Originally Posted by Don Plumley

ORNL - That's cool. Are you using HTS magnets?

I've been working with Bill Schwenterly on a couple of 2G HTS proposals. Do you know Mark Carter?

I don't know if our magnets are HTS or not. Ours operate at 2K (in the superconducting portion of the linac). I don't know Mark Carter - he works down at the main ORNL campus - I'm up at SNS.

[IROC]

Originally Posted by tabs

Really interesting....Whats going to be the max you ramp that beocth up to. At some point you are going to aim that thing and stuff is really going to start spewing off protons.

I would hate to be the one to have to pay that electric bill...

We're currently limited to about 1.4 MW (by design limitations). There is a "power upgrade project" in work to allow 2 MW operation, but that is a ways off.

I haven't checked out power consumption at this 1 MW level, but last spring at 800 kW or so, we were using about 23 MW of electricity.

[dailyATX82sc]

pretty cool, but these guys churn those out..

http://www.proton.co.uk/