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Photos of the Damage To the Large Hadron Collider

Posted by kdawson on from the do-not-try-this-at-home dept.

holy_calamity writes "CERN have released images of the damage done to the world's most powerful machine, the Large Hadron Collider, when an electrical fault caused a helium leak. New Scientist has posted them, along with explanations of what you can see. The sudden burst of gas shifted some of the huge superconducting magnets by half a meter, causing at least $21 million in damage."

6 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. Too bad Congress killed the SSC in Texas... by Zymergy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Ah, through the "wisdom" of the US Congress, the SSC (Superconducting Super Collider) was killed over a mere $12 Billion cost savings (which was well under construction just south of Dallas, TX). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider
    Some say it was largely due to infighting with 'higher educational interests' back East and in the Chicago area, - but really the answer most likely due to nothing more than Greed and Money.

    TO think that The US Federal Government will give taxpayer money to banks et al to the tune of $2 Trillion with NIL oversight and NIL public disclosure is extremely dangerous and shortsighted. ( http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20670001&refer=home&sid=aXNaCKxb.oIs )

    We (in the US) could have had something MORE POWERFUL than the LHC here in the US. (As I try not to think about the high-energy physicist brain-drain to France/Switzerland)...
    Once upon a time, the US took pride in having the best and coolest toys the world over... (/sigh)

    1. Re:Too bad Congress killed the SSC in Texas... by pz · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The worst part about the SSC is mentioned in the parent comment's parenthetical comment about brain drain.

      When the SSC was cancelled, there was a flood of high-energy physicists who were suddenly out of work. The US lost an entire generation of talent in physics. Instead of continuing on with a remarkable collection of centers of excellence, each themselves breeding excellence, and maintain the intellectual, scientific, technical, and economic advantages that the US Government prides itself on, the (pardon me) boneheads in Congress thought it better to continue the long slog toward mediocrity.

      High-energy physics no longer happens in the US (my apologies to readers at LL, LANL, Brookhaven, Fermi, Argonne, Berkeley, and so forth). It happens in Europe and will continue to do so for the forseable future.

      --

      Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
    2. Re:Too bad Congress killed the SSC in Texas... by cmdahler · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I dunno - if I had been in Congress back in 1993 I might have had some doubts about a project that had initially been sold to the government for about $4.5 billion and then ballooned to over three times that amount before the tunnels were even completely dug. There may have been a lot of factors involved in the cancelation of this project, but shutting off a pretty big spigot of wasteful public spending through inept mismanagement and fund milking certainly played a role in Congress' decision. I was living in Dallas at the time and had just graduated a few years before that in physics, so I kept pretty close to all the news stories. The DOE at the time couldn't manage its way out of a wet paper bag, and the wasteful spending and siphoning of funds made the whole thing look like the Big Dig in Boston. To be honest, it's really no wonder Congress canceled the project. At the rate they were going, it would have cost upwards of 20 billion to finish the project, and remember that we were also contributing a huge amount of money to the ISS at the time and had also just come out of a recession, so everyone was real leery about all that money. Wrong time, wrong management, that's ultimately what killed the SSC.

    3. Re:Too bad Congress killed the SSC in Texas... by ortholattice · · Score: 4, Interesting

      And by an odd coincidence, that['s about when particle physics took a detour into String Theory from which it has yet to recover.

      And by another odd coincidence, other particle physicists took a detour into Wall Street, where they applied their advanced mathematical knowledge to creating exotic derivatives like Credit Default Swaps, but arguably without proper financial training or real-world experience. One is tempted to wonder whether the U.S. might be ahead by $2 trillion - $12 billion = $1.988 trillion had they just gone and financed the SSC instead.

  2. i wonder who squealed... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    New Scientist broke these pix, not CERN. I'm pretty sure i know who took those pix (not gonna tell!). "We" where i work have had them for a while, and have elected NOT to spread them around and allow CERN to put them up themselves. I guess someone decided to "help" them out. It is debatable as to the moral rectitude of this decision, but I could have put these up weeks ago and chose _not_ to.

    As i understand it, the pictures you see are taken 5 half-cells away from the primary failure, or somewhere around 50+ meters from the explosion.
    Wow, huh?

    Note the red things in the picture, those are magnet stands, ripped out of the concrete. The magnet body in that shot is sitting on wood cribbing -- it was sitting on the floor. You can deduce the displacement form careful examination.

    Berry ++ ungood. We all feel badly for them and wish them the best of luck.

  3. SSC reuse. by ErkDemon · · Score: 2, Interesting
    On the plus side, it gave Texas the world's finest all-weather underground go-karting track.

    Actually, I'm really quite disappointed in the computer games community, that they haven't used a revamped SSC as a fictional location for a racing game. I mean, you have nice tubular tunnels which means that cars can loop-the-loop and do all sorts of cool things ... at maximum speed, the driving view would be at ~90 degrees to horizontal in the bends ... just needs some section colour coding, a bunch of floating camera pods and some bolt-on gadgetry (viewing stations, etc) for the cars to avoid. Maybe some rocket launchers.

    "SSC Racer". Cooool. If anyone wants to write it, give me a credit somewhere ...

    --
    Eric Baird