Best use of high-voltage, high-powered electron beams: a new approach to contract irradiation services

Japan's first high-voltage, high-powered electron beam processing center is scheduled to come on-line during the first half of 1999. The center explores both challenges and opportunities of how best to use the 200 kW 10 MeV unit and its 5 MeV X-ray line. In particular, Nuclear Fuel Industries, Ltd. (NFI) has expanded the traditional model of a contract irradiation facility to include a much broader scope of services such as door-to-door transport, storage, and direct distribution to its customer's end-users. The new business scope not only finds new value-added components in a competitive marketplace, but serves to provide a viable mechanism to take advantage of the processing logistics of high throughput irradiation units. As such, the center features a high-capacity warehousing system, monitored by a newly developed PCMS (plant control management system), which has been comprehensively integrated into the irradiation unit's handling system, and will require only minimal human resources for its high rate of material handling. The identification and development of initial markets for this first unit will be discussed, concluding with how this same operational philosophy can help break open new irradiation segments in medical devices, consumer goods, animal feed, and food markets and NFI's other efforts in these same areas. (author)