Conveners
Running a Beam Particle Accelerator during the COVID-19 pandemic (II)
- Chair: Glen Johns (ORNL/SNS)
Description
After the initial response to the COVID-19 outbreak, our facilities had to settle into a new way of doing business. Over the past year, what new practices like teleworking, remote access for troubleshooting, remote control, …., did your facility adopt to safely deal with the pandemic? How did life change in the control room? How did you ensure health safety for your staff?
Operating under the pandemic might have had an impact on your operational performance. How were your maintenance activities and outages affected? Did you see a drop in overall beam performance? Did you change the way on-call response was handled? What was the impact to the users?
While a large percentage of the BNL population were required to lock-down, NSLS-II remained running, with 3 beamlines running studies on COVID-19 and potential vaccines. For 4 months, we operated in a mode dubbed Min-Safe– having bare minimum number on site for safe operations and study. The effects of no longer being in-person were drastic in nearly every part of operations.
In this talk...
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was formally characterized as a pandemic on March 11, 2020. On March 25th first lockdown in Poland was introduced. SOLARIS facility operation for users was cancelled until May 30th, 2020 at that time. The facility had to adjust to the new reality. Wearing masks, disinfection and social distance has become obligatory. To continue the work in those...
Synchrotron SOLEIL is the French third generation synchrotron light source in operation since 2007, providing photon beams to 29 beamlines with a maximum intensity of 500 mA, 5000 hours a year. On March 16, 2020, the activity of the site had to stop because of the national lockdown related to the COVID-19 pandemic. It resumed progressively from May 11, 2020 with a shortened two-week machine...
Just like all workplaces, the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory had to adjust to new workplace regulations during Covid. Being part of a large lab was very beneficial for operations. This talk will discuss how we met social distancing, cleaning, and testing protocols, changed meetings, and used remote tools to keep the accelerator running. Finally, I will discuss...
The European Spallation Source is in the installation and commissioning process, with the plan to deliver the first neutrons in 2024. The installation and commissioning process are taking place during the COVID pandemic, with the subsequent impact both of the delivery of the In-Kind contributions, and in the way of working in the Control Room and Linac Tunel.
At the same time, the Operations...