Construction of 1.7 MV Pelletron Tandem Accelerator System and Its Application to Human Resource Development at Tokyo City University Atomic Energy Research Laboratory

Abstract

　Tokyo City University Atomic Energy Research Laboratory was established in 1960 and operated the research reactor “Musashi Reactor” (TRIGA-II type, 100 kW) for 25 years from January 1964 until December 1989. At present, this reactor is being decommissioned. In 2013 the institute decided to introduce a 1.7 MV pelletron tandem accelerator (TCU-tandem). In this paper, we describe the construction of this accelerator system. Among the work, we emphasize the conditioning of the accelerating tube, which had been kept for a long time without operation. The construction was implemented together with students of a nuclear engineering course and was utilized as education and training for them. As applied research using this tandem accelerator, we are planning to extract MeV proton beams and carry out elemental analysis by particle induced X-ray emission(PIXE)/Rutherford backscattering spectroscopy(RBS) methods. Taking advantage of the feature that TCU-tandem is located in a research reactor facility being decommissioned, material analysis related to the decommissioning process will be carried out.