Performance and new capabilities of Spring-8

SPring-8 was commissioned in March 1997 and put into the scheduled operation in October 1997. In 1998 the storage ring was operated for 4190 hours, 62.6% of which was the user time. Presently sixteen beamlines are operational in the user service mode, five are in commissioning and seventeen are under construction. We found that specifications of the accelerators exceed the design values and it becomes clear that the storage ring has much higher performance than that we had expected in the design phase. In addition, insertion devices developed at SPring-8 have proved to be of high performance. In 1998 construction of a 30 m long insertion device and beamline is started.