Serious Magnet Failure at CERN's New Accelerator

GrepNut writes "CERN is reporting that the giant magnets that steer the particle beam in the new and highly anticipated Large Hadron Collider have just failed catastrophically in a stress test, apparently due to a design oversight. It doesn't help that the magnets were designed and built by CERN's US competitor Fermilab." While safety precautions were followed, and no one was injured nor were any rifts in the space-time continuum opened, it's still a rather large setback for the project.

Comments

Not Magnet Failure

[AmIAnAi]

From TFA:

"The failure does not concern the magnets or the cold masses themselves, but rather their assembly in the cryostat."

I know we don't read TFA here, but is it too much for the submitter to get past the first paragraph.

Re:Got what they deserved

[gathas]

I think the 2+ miles under the harbor was actually the most trivial part of the project, being completed well ahead of and opened earlier than the rest of the project. The real challenge was building the new underground roads and associated bridges, ramps etc. while keeping the existing transportation infrastructure operational (albeit in a limited form). They had to deal with building close to existing subway tunnels, dealing with soil that was all landfill, and hitting archaeological sites. The project was certainly wrought with corruption, but to imply that it was somehow inefficient by comparing the length of the roads developed makes little sense.

Not Magnet Failure??

[IvyKing]

I've been involved in the design and construction of several magnets for NMR use - and the supporting structure is usually considered to be part pf the magnet - including the cryostat used in supercons.

The interesting part of the article was that the cryostat design was reviewed by CERN personnel, so the issue of asymmetric loading on the cryostat was overlooked by more than just Fermilab. Sounds like and "Oh shit - nobody thunk of that" moment.

Re:Got what they deserved

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't these people know the 6+ mile Boston "Big Dig" with only 2+ miles under the harbor has so-far cost almost as much as the 31-mile Chunnel?

Hrm, maybe that has something to do with that the Chunnel is 2 miles of interesting parts and 29 miles of a simple tunnel? Not to mention that the Big Dig was a complete renovation of an old infrastructure while keeping the city running at the same time.

Re:worst case scenario

[scheme]

The difference is that the closest black hole in the universe is lightyears away (at least that is the current conception) and the universe seems to be balanced out perfectly so all the dangerous stuff that is floating around doesn't consume the whole universe. It's a careful setup of universal laws that keep it together, just like the ecosystem on earth did for thousands of years.

There are cosmic particles hitting the atmosphere with more energy than the LHC will produce. If the LHC were going to cause a rift in the space time continuum, these particles would have done the same in the last 6 billion years that they've been hitting the atmosphere.

Re:kinda funny, really...

[barakn]

Such chicken-little-the-sky-is-falling hysteria is unwarranted. The collision energies in the LHC are expected to be 14 TeV when using protons. The flux of cosmic rays of energy greater than 1 TeV is 100 per year per square meter of the Earth's surface. That works out to about 1.6 billion such cosmic rays per second around the globe. The collision energies in the LHC are expected to be 1,150 TeV for lead. The flux of cosmic rays of energy greater than 100,000 TeV is one per century per square kilometer of the Earth's surface. With a surface area of ~500,000,000 km^2, that's 5 million cosmic rays per year with energies at least a hundred times greater than the LHC collision energy.

Nature has been performing experiments in our atmosphere for 4.55 billion years at energies much higher than we could hope to attain in a collider. If it was possible for a black hole spawned in one of these event to swallow the Earth (or whatever other nightmare scenario you've envisioned), it would have already happened and you wouldn't be around to discuss it.

Reference 1
Reference 2