Chapter 8: Sustainability considerations

Abstract

Scarcity of resources, along with climate change originating from the excessive exploitation of fossil energy are ever growing concerns for humankind. Particularly, the total electric power consumption of scientific facility operations will become more important as the reliance on fossil fuels is being reduced, carbon-neutral energy sources are still being developed and a larger part of the energy consumption is converted from fossil fuel to electric power.

In our accelerator community we need to give high priority to the realisation of sustainable concepts, particularly when the next generation of large accelerator-based facilities is considered. Indeed, the much-increased performance–higher beam energy and intensity–of proposed new facilities comes together with anticipated increased electric power consumption. In the following we classify the most important development areas for sustainability of accelerator driven research infrastructures in three categories: technologies, concepts and general aspects. We suggest investing R&D efforts in these areas and to assess energy efficiency with an equal level of relevance as the classical performance parameters of the facilities under discussion.