Steady development in SRF accelerator technology combined with the success of large scale installations such as CEBAF at Jefferson Laboratory and the SNS Linac at ORNL gives credibility to the concept of very high average power CW machines for light sources or Proton drivers. Such machines would be powerful tools for discovery science in themselves but could also pave the way to reliable cost effective drivers for such applications as neutrino factories, an energy-frontier muon collider,

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... waste transmutation or accelerator driven subcritical reactors for energy production. In contrast to machines such as ILC that need maximum accelerating gradient, the challenges in these machines are mainly in efficiency, reliability, beam stability, beam loss and of course cost. In this paper the present state of the art is briefly reviewed and options for a multi-GeV, multi-MW CW linac are discussed.