Cyclotron Drivers for Accelerator-Driven Systems

Abstract

Accelerator-Driven system (ADS) can transmute long lived nuclear waste to short lived species. For this system to be fully realizable, a very stable high energy and high power proton beam (typically, 1 GeV beam energy and 10 MW beam power) is required, and preparing such a powerful and stable proton beam is very costly. Currently, the most promising candidate is superconducting linear accelerators. However, high power cyclotrons may be used for ADS particularly at the stage of demonstrating proof of principle of ADS. This paper discusses how cyclotrons can be used to demonstrate ADS.