Particle Accelerators Could Be Used to Produce Energy (and Plutonium)
Tevatron FermilabA long-forgotten physics paper holds the secret Particle accelerators, which are not renowned for their real-world applications, could in fact be used to produce energy, according to a 34-year-old research paper that resurfaced this week. It's not exactly intuitive -- accelerators require plenty of power to work -- but one of the founders of Fermilab wrote in 1976 that they could produce more energy than they use, because they're extremely good at fissioning atoms. At the time, accelerator physicist Robert Wilson was the director of Fermilab, according to Technology Review's arXiv blog. He was building an accelerator called the Energy Doubler/Saver, the first device to use superconducting magnets on a large scale. Wilson wrote that superconductivity would reduce the power consumption of accelerators. Wilson's abstract was recently posted to the physics arXiv, a clearinghouse for research papers. Here's a recap: In the Energy Doubler/Saver, protons comprising an energy of...