Slashdot Mirror
LHC Offline Until April 2009 (Or Longer)
rufey writes "The recent problems at the Large Hadron Collider will now keep it idle until spring 2009. The official press release is here. The LHC went offline due to a suspected failure in a superconducting connection, which overheated and caused around 100 of the LHC's super-cooled magnets to heat up by as much as 100 degrees. This resulted in the accidental release of a ton of liquid helium. The process required to repair the failed superconducting connection involves weeks of warming up the affected area from -456 degrees Fahrenheit to room temperature, and then several more weeks to cool it back down after the repair is made. The total amount of time to do this will spill over into CERN's scheduled winter maintenance/shutdown period, which is partly done to save money on electricity during the period of peak demand."
I can wait till next spring for the world to end.
I thought the absolute zero was at -273...ah, damn americans!
I spent all my money over the last 6 months on alcohol and parties, secure in the knowledge that the world would come to an end this October when the LHC came up to full power.
This is unacceptable. I demand they destroy the world now.
I'm a big tall mofo.
A year from now everyone will be complaining about the huge price tag on this thing that has never been 100% operational.
It's the Windows Vista of supercolliders.
Indeed. I'm not an expert, but I believe "a suspected failure in a superconducting connection, which overheated and caused around 100 of the LHC's super-cooled magnets to heat up by as much as 100 degrees" is just fancy-talk for "we made a wormhole, but it wasn't big enough".
I understand things were going well - then there was this 'big bang'....
AT&ROFLMAO
It looks like you're trying to repair a superconductor coolant loop. Would you like to:
(a) vent all helium
(b) order another 30 ton transformer
(c) damn the torpedoes, lets make some black holes.
Now I'll have to wait even longer to welcome our new demonic overlords who were supposed to come out of the stargate that the LHC will create.
Well, it looks like the best estimates will have the LHC running full collisions will be sometime in December, 2012.
Hey wait a minute!
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Look at the LHC cyro status for sector 3-4. Average magnet temperature is now at 70K, and slowly creeping up to room temperature. Notice the expanded vertical scale on the graph. Compare with the other sectors, holding with liquid helium at 1.9K.
Warmup is slow. Cooldown is slower. Several kilometers of pipe and a hundred or so magnets are involved.
It's not that bad, though. It looks like they won't have to take magnets out of the tunnel for rewinding. That's a huge job. This is just a slow one.
They can warm up or chill down sector 3-4 during the shutdown period. The rest of the system would normally be cooled during shutdown anyway.
When they're using the kind of energy that knocks out country powergrids, then yes, it is a consideration.
The LHC cooling circuit has something like 400 tons of helium in it.
One ton missing sounds reasonable.
The cold doesnt matter, btw. Liquid helium has a really low heat capacity and evaporation enthalpy. A dewar full of liquid nitrogen spilled will do much more damage than 10 times the amount of helium, even if the helium temperature is lower.
And helium is not THAT expensive. At least compared to the other costs.
A physicists analogy is that a LN2 costs as much as cheap beer, while L He as much as good whiskey, per volume... (I once used 2000l of liquid helium in a single week because of a faulty magnet that couldnt be replaced during beamtime. Although that was of course recaptured. I hope they have options to do that in the LHC cave, too, even though the initial containment was breached)
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Okay, I'm a born and raised American, and -453 Fahrenheit means nothing to me. Even us Americans use Celsius for science. If I read a temperature outside of what the weatherman could report, then a Fahrenheit measurement is just another number that I have to convert before it will mean something. (Let's see... being a former Clevelander, the weatherman range would be from about -30 to 110 F.)
Please. If it's science, give us our 'degrees C'.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down.
You're being unfair, but they have a plan.
They're going to rename it the Large Mojave Collider and prove that its just bad press that is making them look bad.
I wonder if anyone has considered the dangers of that much free helium. If there was a horrible accident at LHC if they called anyone their voices would be too high pitched to take seriously.
Q: What did one CERN Scientist say to the other after they collided their first particles?
A: What's the matter?
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
Actually, the world ended when the Red Sox won it all, it's just that nobody noticed.
I am dissappointed. We are on slashdot. Please say instead
"The results will be evalutaed using GNU/Hurd"
or "The operators could finish a round of DNF in the breaks" or "a microsoft linux running on phantom game consoles is used as a thin client operating system" etc...
NO Sports, please!
But seriously, what about space suits? They allow people to survive in absolute 0. Why can't they be used?
This is why I moved to Cincinnati.
For those of you who do not know, that is a Mark Twain quote (presumed to be, anyhow)
"When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati because it's always twenty years behind the times."
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Spacesuits operate in vacuum, which means there are almost no no particles around, so the word temperature does not make much sense there. Vacuum is an excellent insulator, so it is easy to keep them warm. It is a myth that you instantly freeze when exposed to the vacuum of space.
Open Source Alternatives