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How long does the cathode last? And if the beam magnet was turned off is it true it would burn a hole in the ground so much power? And finally how many Sieverts is it directly under the beam? Somebody told me it is mega Sieverts
Hello there. Look up electron beam welding, It is absolutely possible for such beam to burn a hole in many materials. You have to calculate the volume of the irradiated material for that you have to see the penetration of the electrons depending on the density of the material and its area and distribute the beam energy deposited per volume minus the energy converted to x-rays which is usually less than 8% at 5MeV. So if this machine has a beam of 5MeV at 100mA it would have a power of 500kW if 92% of that power (460kW) were to become heat in a thin plate in a cart because the scanning magnet was turned off it would be all dissipated into a volume of a few cm3 and because energy has to go somewhere and almost always ends up becoming heat it will become very hot, enough to melt and even vaporize. About the dose rates. They usually need a few seconds to minutes to irradiate a pallet, the beam is scanned thorough it to give doses of about 25kGy as uniform as possible, so it is reasonable to think that the beam might give dose rates into the Mega Sievert range to be able to process enough material to be economically viable. Co-60 irradiators have Mega Curie sources that output several tens of kWs of power in a large area, so much that the pools were the source racks are stored must be cooled and the irradiation chambers need good ventilation so it does not get too hot and to get rid of the ozone. Yet with all that amount of radioactive material Co-60 irradiators need many hours for the pallets to reach the dose needed.
Most definitely it would burn a hole into many materials. This is why such machines are wonders of engineering, as they continously measure if the whole system is in order: if a magnet fails for whatever reason (or should suddenly deflect the electrons in a wrong direction) this is usually immediately sensed by the control system, effectively either limiting the flow of electroncs or shutting the system down for safety reasons. I've seen a medical LINAC (basically what you see here, but instead of shooting the electrons directly at objects or humans, the electrons in a LINAC hit a tungsten target at such speed that it is converted into high-energy X-rays for radiation treatment. Both the leaves (that control the aperture at which the radiation is applied to the person) and the targets have a limited lifetime as the high-energy X-rays just destroy them bit by bit. The controls always measured how many electrons were leaving the path of the waveguide and as soon as this would exceed a certain limit, the whole unit would turn off, just like the deflecting electromagnets were constantly monitored for drawing current. The electromagnets itself were an interesting piece of electronics: they drew something like 80 Amps and were made out of square copper tubing something like 1/8 in 'diameter' to run a coolant THROUGH the 'wire'. Nope, I don't work with those things, but the only 2 job interviews I had at a nuclear healthcare department I was like a spunge sucking up the information that was fired at me ;)
