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Table-top Particle Accelerator Created
holy_calamity writes "French physicists have built a desktop particle accelerator. It uses a pair of laser beams to precisely control the acceleration of electrons within a plasma. It has the power of a device that usually takes up a whole room and could lead to new medical treatments. They don't mention the potential for experiments like 'what happens if I put my lunch in front of a 300 megaelectronvolt beam?'"
Sure, it's been around for ages. The article even mentions explicitely that this is a decade-old idea. It also says that it has been very difficult to fine-tune this idea. This is what these guys did.
I suggest that you update the Wikipedia article about plasma acceleration...
In fact, you probably have a table top particle accelerator in your house. http://science.howstuffworks.com/atom-smasher2.htm
Yes, a CRT is also considered a particle accelerator!
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
Not quite, you forgot the flux. 300MeV is the energy per electron so you meant ~4e-11 J/electron. I did not RTFA, but I'm guessing the accelerator produced more than one electron. Also, don't forget, luminosity is also an important way to factor the problem --- electrons/area/sec. That being said, I'd be more concerned about the safety of the lasers they must be using to pump the system.
Don't forget all of the other stuff you get from spalling, like high energy X-rays. Actually, at 300MeV, I'd wager on getting a fairly decent gamma ray beam. Without a purpose built collimator, I'd guess that there'd be a good amount of "spray" all over the place. So you'd probably get a hole in a radioactive sandwich, plus a good dose of radiation just for standing nearby. Yes, a healthy dose life-giving radiation.
Remember, the Therac-25 system was quite lethal when it malfunctioned, and it "only" used a 25 MeV beam. 300MeV is a LOT of punch per particle, and if the intensity is high enough all sorts of nasty things will happen.