So we still use a few cyclotrons, but most of the machines that people talk about, especially in the media, are a different type of machine which we … - Suzie Sheehy

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.

[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.

If you just put this beam onto a massive block of copper, you could actually melt 600 tons of copper from solid to liquid, just using the Large Hadron Collider beam.