Report of the Ad Hoc Panel on the Use of Accelerators to Study Irradiation Effects

[10], 54 pages. Footnotes. Tables. Figures. References. Cover has some wear and soiling. Scuff on front cover. There is currently high interest in the use of accelerators to study irradiation effects. The effects produced by heavy ion irradiation and fast neutron irradiation are qualitatively similar. Time to achieve the damage state characteristic of end-of-life service is hours as compared to several years in available reactors. Probably the most important question a person has about radiation is what exposure to it will do to them. It is an invisible, odorless energy that has a lot of mystery about it, so fears and speculation tend to be pretty common. A particle accelerator is a machine that uses electromagnetic fields to propel charged particles to nearly light speed and to contain them in well-defined beams. Large accelerators are used in particle physics as colliders (e.g. the LHC at CERN, KEKB at KEK in Japan, RHIC at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and Tevatron at Fermilab), or as synchrotron light sources for the study of condensed matter physics. Smaller particle accelerators are used in a wide variety of applications, including particle therapy for oncological purposes, radioisotope production for medical diagnostics, ion implanters for manufacture of semiconductors, and accelerator mass spectrometers for measurements of rare isotopes such as radiocarbon. There are currently more than 30,000 accelerators in operation around the world.