Partrec is headed for the black
From survival to success
Door Rob van der Wal
By Rob van der Wal
Rob van der Wal
This year should have been the year. AGOR, the particle accelerator owned by the UMCG’s Partrec institute, should have broken even. ‘There’s no reason to think we won’t succeed’, managing director Henk Heidekamp said optimistically in January of 2023.
The machine, also known as a cyclotron, is unique: it can fire beams of both light and heavy particles, as well as protons, helium, carbon, and heavy ions. People from all over the world have come to Groningen to have tissue radiated or to figure out how well their rocket parts can withstand radiation in space.
Outages
But things didn’t quite go according to plan. Starting in late 2021, when it was put back into action after Covid, AGOR kept having problems. Ten years of overdue maintenance led to a wealth of outages. The particle accelerator would work for a month and then be about commission for another. ‘We went from incident to incident. We were in survival mode’, says Heidekamp.
We went from incident to incident
They couldn’t keep this up. ‘At some point, you have to decide to do things differently.’ The solution was a radical one: they would shut down AGOR for a year, from summer 2023 to summer 2023.
Their biggest issue was the system that cools the particle accelerator using helium. ‘It had leaks that we simply couldn’t find’, says Heidekamp. ‘We had to bring in outside experts to finally track them down.’
Spending money
The problems also had financial consequences. The maintenance costs well exceeded the 1.25 million euros the UMCG had received when it bought the accelerator from the UG. The energy costs also became excessive: they went from approximately 300,000 euros a year to five times as much in 2022, at the height of the energy crisis. ‘The entire budget was out of whack’, says Heidekamp.
So the UMCG had to spend money on the accelerator. They’re almost at a million euros, because even when still owned by the UG, the particle accelerator was operating at a loss. The extra maintenance costs alone ‘are hundreds of thousands of euros’, says Heidekamp. They went way over budget on their reserves, putting the kibosh on their goal of becoming budget neutral by 2025.
But it’s not all bad news. The large-scale maintenance operations have brought the staff closer together, says Heidekamp. ‘People really pull together when you’re in that kind of trouble.’
Market potential
That’s also why he never considered closing AGOR or giving it back to the UG. ‘We took over operations because we care about the research. It was never about the money.’ Besides, the accelerator is too important to the industry to just scrap it. There are only two particle accelerators in Europe that can do what this cyclotron can.
People really pull together when you’re in that kind of trouble
And as last month’s report by Deloitte concluded, the professional field is also interested in the accelerator. Deloitte, a consultancy agency, had been asked to evaluate the accelerator’s financial situation after the UMCG had acquired it from the UG and to explore its market potential by talking to interested corporations.
‘We had planned to hire them sooner’, says Heidekamp. ‘But you can only evaluate the accelerator properly if it’s fully functional. It wasn’t operating at full capacity this summer, but it is now.’
Deloitte’s report is currently being evaluated by the UMCG’s board of directors, which means Heidekamp can’t say very much about it.
Commercial assignments
One thing is for sure: Partrect wants to focus on attracting more commercial assignments. After all, they have a considerable deficit to get rid of. Corporations can rent the machines, relevant staff, and the systems for a specific time period, known as beam time, to do research using the radiation the particle accelerator produces.
Because AGOR was out of commission, Partrec has only sold 800 hours of beam time a year to corporations and the UMCG’s research department. That wasn’t enough to cover the cost of operation: proper management requires the particle accelerator using at least 1,500 of the 3,000 available hours of beam time a year.
But Heidekamp thinks it will all work out this year. There are enough interested parties to achieve that 1,500 hour threshold. ‘With everything we expect from the UMCG’s research department alone, we’re most of the way there.’ But because the UMCG hours don’t pay as much as corporate ones do, the budget isn’t quite complete.
New clients
Partrec also rents out time to corporate clients. Salespeople will be looking for new clients for Partrec. They already have a few, including the European Space Agency, which will be testing all of its spaceship parts before launching them.
We’re most of the way there with all the research at the UMCG
The cyclotron will probably also be used as quality control for corporations that manufacture electronics for the automotive industry, for example. ‘But we haven’t signed any contracts for that yet, because the accelerator wasn’t up and running last year.’ But it’s just a matter of time, says Heidekamp.
Partrec also has commercial clients that don’t need the particle accelerator. For instance, they’ll be assisting the development of new isotopes for the Shine corporation out of Veendam. ‘We’ll be configuring their particle accelerator for them in Veendam.’ This will net them half a million euros.
They’ve also managed to get the operational costs under control. The UMCG doesn’t have to pay rent to the UG for the building that houses Partrec. And the price for electricity, which rose catastrophically in 2022 due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has returned to an acceptable 20 cents per kilowatt hour.
Preventative maintenance
One expense has gone up, however: maintenance. The budget for maintenance used to be 80,000 euros, but it’s now been increased to 300,000. ‘The earlier maintenance budget wasn’t realistic’, Heidekamp explains. ‘We’ve also started doing preventative maintenance. We weren’t doing that before.’
That means they can finally start working on an accelerator that’s working properly, although there might be some issues with the software. AGOR will be using open source software, which the staff will have to adjust and configure to the accelerator. Heidekamp understands that this is a risk. ‘But quite a few cyclotrons use open source software. That means there’s a big community that helps each other out in case of issues.’
Heidekamp expects the accelerator to operate at a deficit of three to four hundred thousand euros this year, but that it will start turning a profit in 2026. We hope to be back to normal operations by 2027, and be back in the black.’