The planned particle accelerator and adjacent laboratory will promote research in material structure and life sciences.
The Atomic Energy Commission is planning to shut down the Soreq Nuclear Research Center and replace it with a state-of-the-art particle accelerator, to be set up next to the existing reactor.
Soreq Nuclear Research Center director Dr. Zvi Kaplan said that the planned facility would produce neutrons by accelerating protons (particles created from nuclear fission). The planned particle accelerator and adjacent laboratory will promote research in material structure and life sciences. The accelerator will also produce radioactive isotopes for medical research and industrial uses – the same types currently being produced by the existing reactor.
Kaplan said that construction of the particle accelerator would allow Israeli scientists to specialize in areas for which they now use accelerators in Europe, the US and Japan (there is only one accelerator in Israel, at the Weizmann Institute). Kaplan assesses that the first stage of setting up the accelerator will be completed in two years, and that the entire project will begin operations in 2006.
Published by Israel's Business Arena on 9 December, 2001