When I was a kid, fusion was going to the be the Next Big Thing. By the 21st century we were all going to have a fusion reactor the size of a garbage can in the basement and in our cars and the power monopolies and fossil fuels were going to be a thing of the past.
Electrons are of little use to me. I wanna accelerate protons and neutrons!
I actually have most of the guts of an isotope ratio mass spectrometer, including the turbopumps, so vacuum is not the issue. Sucking MeVs from SDG&E through my house panel would be, ummm, âsomewhat problematic.â
Neutrons are out of question. No charge, nothing to grab them by to push them. The best bet here is to make them by a nuclear reaction from protons or deuterons or so. Such neutron generators exist.
Protons should be easy-ish. Ionize hydrogen, push forward the ions.
Itâs about the beam current. The spectrometers donât need their own power-plant. You can have a decent small cyclotron that doesnât eat more than a coffee maker. You can get a megavolt pulse on comparatively low current, using Marx generator. (Or a van de Graaf generator. Van de Graaf powered linear accelerators exist.) On the other hand, a simple electron beam generator of welding or furnace grade can easily suck a megawatt.