Suzie Sheehy Quotes

Now is the stuff that does us damage, and there's three... types... called alpha, beta and gamma radiation. ...Alpha radiation won't go through your hand, beta radiation won't go through a piece of aluminum [a few millimeters thick] and gamma radiation is penetrating and won't go through a big piece of .

[Y]ou can have two... main types of radiation, which are ionizing, or non-ionizing.

So what is ? It's energy in the form of moving particles or waves, emitted by an atom or another body as it changes from one energy state to another. That's the official definition.

There's this guy called Monsier Mangetout... a Frenchman who, according to Wikipedia ate all of these crazy things. Even he, though, wouldn't eat a particle accelerator because parts of the machine become radioactive, and while he seems to be fairly stupid, given the things he ate, even he wouldn't go that far.

So we can't use it as a weapon of mass destruction. This is another one... that someone told me that you shouldn't do with a particle accelerator... [Y]ou shouldn't eat it, which is true.

The only problem is [that] the accelerator for this is about 10 times more powerful... than we can currently make. So there's lots of challenges for people like me who design accelerators, to try and come up with ways of making them more and more powerful, for very good reason.

So there's some really interesting applications of accelerators, way outside of the realm of particle physics, that we're starting to get a handle on.

[O]ne of the reasons we want to do this is because we want to drive... an . This is where you take a , a fission reactor. In the core, instead of having , it has an element called , which is... much more abundant, and you don't have to refine it. You can use all of it. Hook up to the reactor a particle accelerator, a very high power proton accelerator. So the protons come in and they smash into a heavy metal target and create s... [T]hose neutrons... drive the reaction in the reactor, so without the accelerator there, the reactor is subcritical. It doesn't produce energy. It doesn't sustain a , but once you add in the accelerator you can continue to drive the reaction and generate energy... [I]n fact you could transmute existing nuclear waste into something much shorter lived and much safer.

What could you do... if you took particle accelerators, and you made them really powerful... [T]his is something that I work on, is taking proton accelerators of relatively low energy, but putting more and more particles in, and getting a really high beam power...

So we can't use it as a weapon. ...No deployed weapon has ever used this technology.

They developed this machine which was only about this big [~1 meter] and they used ultra-lightweight materials, and it only weighed about 50 kg. So compare that with a 27 kilometer long ring. ...It was only low energy but they... sent it up in a rocket and they actually tested it in space and brought it back down... and they tested it again on earth, and it still worked, which I think is an incredible feat of engineering... [P]eople really haven't heard of this experiment... It's called the BEAR (Beam Experiments Aboard a Rocket) project in 1989, and I have a contact who worked on it...

But they did, in fact. One of the interesting things I discovered, they did put a particle accelerator in space, which I think is fantastic.

Well they quickly realized that this was crazy, and that they were never going to be able to actually make a weapon out of one of these machines. Mostly for the reasons that I explained before. Even if you had the Large Hadron Collider in space, I have no idea how you'd get it up there, but even if you did, it would... be difficult to do damage with it. Mostly because beams would just go through things and out the other side.

People in the U.S. did think about building a particle accelerator (a neutral beam accelerator) that they would launch into space... and then they would use it to shoot down satellites and... missiles and destroy anything that they didn't like, because they were going to have this super powerful beam in space.

Number three. Don't use a particle accelerator as a death ray. When I was putting together this lecture I asked... my very esteemed colleagues, "Has anyone ever tried to develop an accelerator as a weapon?" And they said, "Oh mumble, mumble cold war, space, Star Wars something or other... No" That was their conclusion... They were wrong.