Last week the BE-CEM-EPR team successfully installed a new Co60 source in the CC60 facility at CERN.

The installation was meticulously planned and executed with the orchestration of activities between two external companies, Radioprotection (DG-RP) and Transport (EN-HE) teams.

The CC60 facility hosted already a source with an initial activity of 10TBq (in 2014, now 4.6 TBq), but for several applications the source was not providing a high enough dose rate.

The new source with an initial activity of 110TBq will be used for the radiation testing and qualification of electronics components and materials employed in the accelerators and the experiments. The new source complements the source already installed in the irradiator. This will allow users to reach higher doses and in a much faster timescale. The dose rate in the CC60 facility with only the 10TBq source spans from few mGy/hour up to 25Gy/h (on ~5 cm2). With this new source installation, it is possible to reach much higher doses 464Gy/hour (on ~5cm2), as well as to reach higher doses on larger volumes allowing faster irradiations also for bulky equipment.

From today, and for a couple of weeks, a calibration and dose mapping campaign will start to have functional positions where users can test. The facility in 2021 hosted already 15 users with a total dose delivered of 281 kGy. The future planning is quite busy considering that there are already 6 users ready to start testing, but with the new source, their test might go much faster.

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