OT: Do Cyclotrons Only Consume Power

[Rustybolt]

My neighbor already has one, but he had to build a nuclear reactor to supply the electricity. When he runs it, it interrupts every one elses electric power.

[alanganes]

OK....
Barnes/Jewish Hospital has at least one in the basement, because some of their imaging, etc isotopes have half lives of minutes, and have to be made right there.

As a point of interest, Barnes/Jewish is getting another one for proton beam cancer treatment:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9-kA3alMl0

I work for the company that developed this. It is a 250 MeV synchrocyclotron built using a superconducting magnet to get the size down to a manageable size (in relative terms). It's been producing beam for a while now and is very close to coming on line.

[Evan]

What makes me laugh when I think about it is that right in the middle of Berkeley, California, one of the only towns in North America to have a communist government and the centre of everything that is anti-everything, there is, at the University a nuclear reactor in the basement of one of the halls. It's a small research reactor that can even run under remote control but is still a reactor. I wonder how many of the professional protesters know about it?

[J Tiers]

OK.... Washington University used to have a cyclotron on the main campus, perhaps 200-400 feet from residences across Forest Park Parkway....... no problems, no dimming the lights, fuggetaboutit. The residents in question are the biggest NIMBY's you can imagine, also..... maybe they never knew about it.

Barnes/Jewish Hospital has at least one in the basement, because some of their imaging, etc isotopes have half lives of minutes, and have to be made right there.

A cyclotron can be pretty small..... the size of an MRI machine, perhaps, and can consume about the same power or less. Not some sort of atomic bomb that will suck you all into a black hole. They are straightforward machines, and do what they do nicely.

Y'all need to worry about something important instead.

[Evan]

Some pretty fantastic shapes that look a lot like neurons for some odd reason.

[Fasttrack]

I have always wanted to build a linear accelerator.

I've built two now. Unfortunately, they were intended strictly for research as they were built with University resources. I always wanted to build one in my basement, so to speak, also. I suppose you are familiar with "electron trees", but for those who are not, just Google "lichtenberg figures"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Po35...feature=fvwrel

[Evan]

A cyclotron emits radiation as its primary direct byproduct of operation. A bit of noise from some cooling fans and vacuum pumps and that's about it. Radiation is easily stopped by big chunks of concrete. There is a lot of money in medical isotopes. The primary reason for building a local cyclotron is that many of the preferred radioisotopes have very short half lives which is why they are preferred. Short half life radionuclides do less harm to patients. They are used for mapping of organs such as the thyroid with radioactive iodine and for cancer treatment such as radioactive pellets inserted in the prostate. The problem with short half life isotopes is they have no shelf life and can't be shipped far. They need to be made close to place of use.

I have always wanted to build a linear accelerator.





I already have the globe which is the hard part.

[macona]

There is a guy in Alaska that is putting this cyclotron together is over on PM, or at least used to be. I think he went by the name Cyclotronguy. From what I remember he had everyone around getting into a hissy-fit because they have so clue what it is.

There have been people working on small ones using big rare earth magnets. And I think there is even a high school student who set one up. Not terribly complex but the magnetic fields make it somewhat dangerous, though not nearly as bad as a MRI.

[EddyCurr]

Berkley National Laboratory estimates that a typical 30 MeV cyclotron requires about 400 kW
to run. ... at full capacity for 1 hour, it would need 400 kW-hrs ... Also, it would be reasonable
to subtract about 120 kW from that figure since we are only talking about a 17 MeV machine.

That's not so bad, there are stationary fuel cells that can handle 400kWh. Mind, fuel cells
are still fossil fuel-based energy sources.

So are you going to start up a NIMBY petition to stop the whole thing?

Phffft- who'd sign?

.

[bob_s]

Okay, so they are re-purposing the University farm. There is most likely sufficient space available to put in a power generation facility also.
So are you going to start up a NIMBY petition to stop the whole thing?

[Forestgnome]

Cyclotrons are only energy consumers. They're basically a high power transmitter with a chamber instead of an antenna. I suspect you could build a small one on the order of 20-100kw.

[Fasttrack]

Berkley National Laboratory estimates that a typical 30 MeV cyclotron requires about 400 kW to run. Supposing that it was running at full capacity for 1 hour, it would need 400 kW-hrs. Total operational cost for said cyclotron (including salaries for technicians, research scientists, etc): ~1 million USD per year.

There are quite a few cost-benefit analysis reports floating around for various cyclotrons. They're pretty old technology and very much "plug and play" type equipment. Many universities purchase cyclotrons for research, isotope production, even student labs.



As far as I know, TRIUMF is still the world's largest cyclotron. 500 MeV is pretty ridiculous for a cyclotron. Here at IU we have a 137 MeV cyclotron that is considered big. These values are, of course, small compared to synchrotrons. The LHC is a super conducting synchrotron and accelerates particles to about 7 TeV, which is 14,000 times higher energy than TRIUMF.


(EDIT: the 400 kW includes all the peripherals, from vacuum pumps, to chillers, to lights, to coffee pots ... well maybe not coffee pots Also, it would be reasonable to subtract about 120 kW from that figure since we are only talking about a 17 MeV machine. Most of the power usage goes to the RF amplifiers and the magnets. Both of those would scale down by about half, which equates to a reduction of about 120 kW)

To put this in perspective, I just read an article online about how Kellog's "Eggo" plant had reduced their energy consumption by 675,000 kW-hrs by implementing a compressed air system. So, I would guess that any major industrial areas draw significantly more power from the grid than the cyclotron will...

[EddyCurr]

...you know a lot more about this ...

Only what I've read.

The overall site comprises two islands amounting to just over 600 acres
of essentially undeveloped farm land in the center of a very mature urban
residential area.

One doesn't just tap the existing adjacent infrastructure for energy (or anything
else) for a project like this.

Photovoltaics, biomass cogeneration and other catch words are bandied about
as alternatives to fossil fuels. However, it would take a pretty sizable array of
panels to heat the coffee pots for the Starbucks outlets that will appear, not
to mention servicing all the rest of the demand from 20K people/day.

.

[EddyCurr]

... as I recall there is an issue in that some half lives are short enough that being
Toronto getting much of theirs from a facility in Buffalo (1.5 hours away) is a problem...

A limitation of deriving them via fission:

Backgrounder: Producing medical isotopes using X-rays

"In the case of Tc-99m, Mo-99 is collected from the by-products of
splitting the uranium atoms, packaged into nuclear pharmaceuticals and
shipped to hospitals around the world. The Mo-99, with a half-life of
66 hours, decays into Tc-99m, which has a half-life of 6 hours."

[RLWP]

OK, clearly you know a lot more about this than the rest of us. You tell us

Richard