Tevatron: Day of Doom

[beamjockey]

The final store is now circulating in the Tevatron. At breakfast, it was just below 100E30 luminosity units (per square centimeter per second).

The Tevatron's final crew is on shift. It will be a long day for them; after the 2 PM ceremony, after the officials and camera crews and Tevatron designers have left the Main Control Room for the party, the crew will be putting the Tevatron into standby, as well as continuing to operate other accelerators.

Picnic tents are up in the Horseshoe. TV cameras are in place in Ramsey Auditorium and the MCR. Lighting has been adjusted and links have been tested. An absurdly large TV has been placed in the MCR, so that the people there may see people speaking on the Auditorium stage.

Fermilab endures. Here are plans for the future.

Tevatron fact sheet.

About the shutdown process.

The original 1979 plan: A Report on the Design of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory Superconducting Accelerator. Dr. Helen Edwards, one of its co-authors, will be performing the shutdown.

Comments

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

How much induced radioactivity is there in the tunnel? Will the magnets/etc. have to be treated as low level radioactive waste?

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

It varies, but generally only components in direct contact with the beam show measurable residual radioactivity, not tunnel walls or floor. For (at a guess) 99% of the components in the ring, the amount is mild.

In limited areas, components have a somewhat higher level of activity and might need special attention in planning their removal.

Everyone who enters the tunnels has suitable training and dosimetry equipment or, in rare cases such as film crews or touring ambassadors, is accompanied by a qualified radiation worker.

Tevatron components will for the most part be left in place for more than a year, after which their radioactivity will be considerably lower. Activity is dominated by relatively short-lived isotopes.

The Director is talking about opening detector halls and a portion of the tunnel to public tours at some point in the future. Radioactivity in these halls and tunnels is already quite low, and before the public was invited in, Fermilab staff would measure and document activity to confirm that it was within allowable limits.

[mbumby.livejournal.com]

I've been hearing about the planned tours for a while. If there were a special tour that would have a bunch of my favorite people attending, I might be more interested in attending that than a generic one...

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

I bet the targets in fixed target experiments get a lot more activation.

Fun fact learned while browsing the FNAL web site: the LSND experiment at Los Alamos put nearly a gram of 800 MeV protons into its target during its run. I imagine the high intensity plans you all have will go even higher.