Beginnings
The 3R energy concept revolutionised energy thinking in Big Science. WA3RM’s mission is to bring that revolution to industry.
The “3R” in WA3RM comes from the energy concept “Responsible, Renewable, Recyclable” of the European Spallation Source ESS, where the WA3RM team was first formed, tasked with delivering a sustainable research facility, that was energy efficient, used only renewable energy and recycled waste heat.
At ESS, we began to view waste streams as a resource. The value of a waste stream can be affected by efforts to conserve the quality of the resource. For waste heat, temperature is an vital quality. As ESS Energy Division, we therefore re-examined accelerator technology. One such technology was the Klystrons. Klystrons are amplifiers, used to amplify the wave signal to accelerate the protons. We re-invented the cooling for the klystrons, to separate three different temperature levels of waste heat, allowing higher-value recycling as district heating and local heating.
On June the 30th 2015 the energy division closed as planned, on time, on budget and with a cost reduction of 30% on the energy bill, going from annual 15 M€ to 10 M€. WA3RM was founded shortly after as a spin-off from ESS continuing to offer the industry an incredible tool to help go beyond sustainable
Workshop and publications
During our time at ESS, together with ERF and CERN, we founded “Workshop Energy for Sustainable Science” which is being held biannually to share and improve the work towards sustainable research facilities. Our research have also been published on different platforms where Nature is one of them, for full list see Reference and publications.
One of the key deliverables from ESS energy division was the Energy design report, download here: