That thing... is radioactive. They're called thoriated rods, and they're used in welding. You can... just buy them. - Suzie Sheehy

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.

In the days of Cockroft and Walton, when they were first developing particle accelerators they didn't know about the dangers of radiation, and so one of the ways that they counted the events... what was happening in their experiments, was... to sit... under the beam. The beam would come down, some nuclear reaction would happen, and... his fluorescent screen... would light up every time what they were looking for happened... [T]hey would sit there and count each time it lit up, sitting underneath the beam, being irradiated. ...[T]hese people lived relatively healthy lives, and Cockroft and Walton got a for work, which doesn't justify it, but there have been people who have stuck their heads in particle accelerators.

The next thing we want to do with those particles is to give them some energy. That's the basics of how an accelerator works. I've got a machine here called a which does that...