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"  The palladium that powers Tony Stark&amp;#039;s arc reactor\u2014and, by extension, his Iron Man exoskeleton suit\u2014is slowly leaking into his bloodstream and killing him. And the fast-talking industrialist has exhausted the rest of the periodic table looking for an element that is a safer power source than palladium. Stark&amp;#039;s only option is to create a new element\u2014which he does by constructing a particle accelerator in his workshop out of some metal tubes. When he flips on the switch, two beams of light collide, creating a third beam that Stark steers (using a wrench, and with much destruction to the walls of his workshop) into a brand new arc reactor. (Check out the scene in the trailer, below, at around the 1:18 mark.) It all seems very easy, at least for someone like Tony Stark.  &amp;quot;Particle accelerators have been in the zeitgeist for a couple of years now because of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland,&amp;quot; says Todd Satogata, a physicist in the Collider-Accelerator Department at Brookhaven National Labs. &amp;quot;There are good things and bad things about the portrayals of particle accelerators in media.&amp;quot; According to Satogata, particle accelerators are built to accelerate and collide neutrons, protons and other the subatomic particles at very high speeds. And while they are can create new elements\u2014an event that occurs every 5 or 10 years\u2014it doesn&amp;#039;t happen exactly as Iron Man 2 portrays it. &amp;quot;You smash the nuclei of particles together, and sometimes enough of them stick together that a new element is created [with] a new nucleus of an element that&amp;#039;s heavy enough to be stable,&amp;quot; Satogata says. &amp;quot;But it&amp;#039;s not really stable. Most of the new elements that get created like this last billionths of a second before they disintegrate.&amp;quot; Because of this instability, it&amp;#039;s very difficult to store elements as Stark does in his arc reactor: They need to be moving at nearly the speed of light.  But could someone build a particle accelerator in his home (or tiny lab), like Tony Stark does? The answer might surprise you. &amp;quot;People have,&amp;quot; Satogata says. &amp;quot;As a matter of fact, occasionally you get a really smart teenager building one.&amp;quot; (Fun fact: The first particle accelerator, called a cyclotron, was 5 inches in diameter\u2014small enough to hold.) You&amp;#039;d need a beam tube with a large vacuum, charged particles, magnets to bend the beam, and radio frequency oscillators, or RF cavities, to accelerate the particles. &amp;quot;For the types of things he&amp;#039;s doing, he&amp;#039;d probably need much bigger magnets\u2014I didn&amp;#039;t even see any magnets,&amp;quot; Satogata says. &amp;quot;So that&amp;#039;s a little bit unrealistic unless he&amp;#039;s got really, really strong magnets.&amp;quot; There&amp;#039;s nothing to accelerate the particles, either, but Satogata says the RF cavities could be offscreen.  Powering the accelerator, however, might be an issue. 2.5 miles long, Brookhaven&amp;#039;s superconducting collider needs 10 to 15 megawatts of power\u2014enough for 10,000 or 15,000 homes. &amp;quot;For Stark to run his accelerator, he&amp;#039;s gotta make a deal with his power company or he&amp;#039;s gotta have some sort of serious power plant in his backyard,&amp;quot; Satogata says. &amp;quot;But then again, he&amp;#039;s got a reactor in his chest that powers the Iron Man suit, so he could draw some of that power off and run his particle accelerator. Within the mythos of Iron Man, I don&amp;#039;t think that&amp;#039;s crazy.&amp;quot; But there are two things in the scene that are crazy to Satogata: One, that Stark would just stand in the room with his accelerator and expose himself to massive amounts of radiation; and two, that the resulting elemental beam would only go in one direction. &amp;quot;When two cars crash into each other, do all the parts fly off to one side, or do they fly off to both sides?&amp;quot; He asks. &amp;quot;If stuff crashes head on, generally all the stuff that comes out does not all go off to one side. And in that scene, he had two beams colliding head on, where was all the beam coming out? One side. Conservation of momentum was violated. That&amp;#039;s a big one. We&amp;#039;ve been comfortable with that for, oh, 400 years. If you had extra magnets around that beam to focus it, then I could believe it. But just a wrench ain&amp;#039;t gonna do it. Sorry.&amp;quot;      "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/a12418/iron-man-2-particle-accelerator/>