Lighthouse project completed, and project terminated

Since 2019 a dedicated team at RI has been working for the Lighthouse project, an accelerator to produce the medical isotope Mo-99.
In late December the team managed to successfully finish all projects commissioned by the customer IRE. Nevertheless, IRE decided to stop the entire Lighthouse project because of unsurmountable problems in parts other than the accelerator. While we at RI regret this end of a great collaboration, we are very happy about the results we could achieve within this project:
We showed that a 75MeV/3MW electron accelerator can indeed be built and completed the design.
The prototypes that were built include a photoinjector which accelerated e-beams (350kV, up to 40mA), a machine protection system able to safely shut-down the accelerator within <1µs, and a CW RF-amplifier producing 130kW at an amazing efficiency of 62%. The full engineering design for a superconducting acceleration module (1.3GHz, 12.5MeV/m) was completed and a power-coupler for it will be tested in the spring.

It was an amazing project! We are grateful for the trust @IRE put into us and we thank the many, many partners who supported the effort by providing components, sharing designs, supporting tests, reviewing concepts etc.: Cornell University, ASML, Demcon, Amphos, Creates, Cryoelectra, Cosylab, HZB, DESY, PSI, Thales, XP Power, Berges, I-Tech, Cryoworld, and many more.

RI learned a lot in this project and we are eager to bring our knowledge into new projects. If you have demanding tasks involving a particleaccelerator, then contact us. We will be happy to discuss solutions!