High-power Free-Electron Lasers were made possible by advances in superconducting linac operated in an energy-recovery mode, as demonstrated by the spectacular success of the Jefferson Laboratory IR-Demo. In order to get to much higher power levels, say a fraction of a megawatt average power, many technological barriers are yet to be broken. BNL's Collider-Accelerator Department is pursuing some of these technologies for a different application, that of electron cooling of high-energy hadron beams. I will describe work on CW, high-current and high-brightness electron beams. This will include a description of a superconducting, laser-photocathode RF gun employing a new secondary-emission multiplying cathode and an accelerator cavity, both capable of producing of the order of one ampere average current.

We present the design, the parameters of a small test Energy Recovery Linac (ERL) facility, which is under construction at Collider-Accelerator Department, BNL. This R & D facility has goals to demonstrate CW operation of ERL with average beam current in the range of 0.1 - 1 ampere, combined with very high efficiency of energy recovery. A possibility for future up-grade to a two-pass ERL is considered. The heart of the facility is a 5-cell 700 MHz super-conducting RF linac with HOM damping. Flexible lattice of ERL provides a test-bed for testing issues of transverse and longitudinal instabilities and diagnostics of intense CW e-beam. ERL is also perfectly suited for a far-IR FEL. We present the status and our plans for construction and commissioning of this facility.

We present here the design and construction of an all niobium superconducting RF injector to generate high average current, high brightness electron beam. A 1/2 cell superconducting cavity has been designed, built, and tested. A cryostat has been built to cool the cavity to (almost equal to)2 K. The RF system can deliver up to 500 W at 1.3 GHz to the cavity. A mode-locked Nd:YVO4 laser, operating at 266 nm with 0.15 W average power, phase locked to the RF, will irradiate a laser cleaned Nb surface at the back wall of the cavity. Description of critical components and their status are presented in the paper.