DEVELOPMENT OF AN ELECTRON LINAC AT PNC FOR TRANSMUTATION STUDIES

Various methods have been examined to transmute long-lived fission pro ducts using accelerators at PNC. The present paper describes the devel opment of a high power continuous wave (CW) electron linac which was s tarted in 1989 to study the feasibility of nuclear waste transmutation . Transmutation by photonuclear reaction using an electron accelerator has the advantage of producing a relatively small amount of secondary radioactive waste. It is also deemed to broaden the base of accelerat or technology. The PNC high power CW electron accelerator, which is de signed to accelerate energies up to 10 MeV and an average beam current of 20 mA and has a normal conducting traveling wave resonant ring (TW RR) disk-loaded accelerating tubes, was pre-commissioned with an injec tor and the first accelerating tube. In December 1995, the accelerator had been partially built and the pre-commissioning of the injector be gan. We have been successful to produce electron beams with 3 msec pul se width, 100 mA peak, and about 2.9 MeV energy. The facility construc tion will be completed in March 1997, followed by the commissioning of the entire 10 MeV linac. (C) 1997 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.