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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."

14 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Odd... articles on Slashdot aren't usually read.

  2. Doubts. by philspear · · Score: 4, Funny

    I'm conCERNed that this think may never stay functional long enough to destroy the earth.

    On an unrelated note, if there's two things I love, one is pointless, likely redundant puns, and the other is shouting "the sky is falling!"

  3. 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 SBacks · · Score: 4, Funny

      the (pardon me) boneheads in Congress

      Well, if you think you can do better, I hear there's an opening for sale in Illinois.

    3. 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.

    4. 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.

    5. Re:Too bad Congress killed the SSC in Texas... by idontgno · · Score: 5, Funny

      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

      That's the scariest correlation I've heard in a long time.

      <Credit Bank VP>: "'Morning, Erwin, how's the CDO hedge working out? Makin' the firm some megabux?"
      <Ex-physicist>: "Maybe we did, maybe we didn't."

      In the end, the VP opened Erwin Schrödinger's books, collapsed the quantum superposition of mortgage debt obligations, and found that the economy was dead.

      --
      Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
  4. This is actually pretty cool... by deft · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is actually pretty cool... and I'll tell you why I feel that way.

    If it just worked, I'd be amazed at the results, follow the discoveries. But there's something about it NOT working that reminds me this is the cuttingf edge of the cutting edge. Thi is when the rocket launch explodes on the pad, this is when the systems fail... and it shouts "humanity is working outside its limits, and we're pushing those limits every time we do something like this". I dig it when the REALLY REALLY smart people have issues with something... usually thats very cool stuff.

    I should say when they have trouble with 'technical/physics/electronics' kind of stuff. Not with women. We know they have trouble there already.

    --

    There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
  5. I liked the earlier description... by CohibaVancouver · · Score: 4, Informative

    I preferred the description of the damage that was released a couple of days ago on CNET-

    http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-10120215-76.html

    "A resistive zone developed in one of the electrical connections, creating an electrical arc that punctured one of the helium enclosures around a magnet, according to an analysis by CERN. The warming helium expanded in the vacuum enclosure of the central subsector of the pipe, damaging the vacuum barriers separating the central subsector from the neighboring subsectors."

    Geordi La Forge couldn't have said it better.

    1. Re:I liked the earlier description... by CorporateSuit · · Score: 4, Funny

      I just don't see why it was so hard for them to prevent something so simple as that. I mean, c'mon, it's not rocket science!

      --
      I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
  6. Just a Cover Story by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 5, Funny

    Anyone who has been following these developments closely knows that the "helium leak" is just a cover story for the out of control mini black hole they created when they turned it on. Those magnets were shifted when they were finally able to collapse down the black hole, it went out with a massive gravitation burst (measured by seismographs as far away as the USGS Hawaii Volcano Observatory) that damaged a lot more equipment then they are letting on. Now that they know how dangerous it is, I wouldn't count on them ever turning on the Large Hardon Collider again.

    --
    When information is power, privacy is freedom.
  7. Re:Why red by David+Gerard · · Score: 4, Funny

    The Large Hardon Collider is designed to pump various types of hardon up to huge energies before banging them together. However, many concerned citizens without the personal experience or understanding of what hardons do worry at the idea of the large hardons being sucked deep into a black hole.

    The device will push large, energised hardons through a ring repeatedly, faster and faster, as smoothly and tightly as possible, until they clash and spray matter in all directions. "It's nothing that cosmic rays don't do all the time all over the place," reassured a particularly buff scientist. "It's perfectly right and natural."

    Low-energy hardon physics and the temperature dependence of hardon production are well understood, as is the process of a hardon smoothly entering the nucleus. But some question what may happen at greater, hotter energies.

    Church leaders have come out at the device. "They're the same polarity!" said Pope Palpatine XVI. The Church worries that strange matter may recruit normal matter and turn it strange.

    After a premature ejaculation of gas, the Large Hardon Collider has been delayed until July 2009. "I'm so sorry," stammered a scientist, "this has never happened to us before."

    --
    http://rocknerd.co.uk
  8. Re:MRI Quenching by blueg3 · · Score: 4, Informative

    That's not a feature, that's a side effect. Some types of failure cause the liquid helium to warm up until the magnet is no longer at superconducting temperatures. This causes a sudden resistance, which can damage the magnet, heats the whole system up (boiling off the coolant), et cetera. MRI systems generally have an emergency shutoff feature, the side effect of which is magnet quenching.

    In this case, a quench is what happened -- resistance in the circuit caused helium boiloff, which destroyed superconductivity. They have many safeguards for this, as this was well-known before the first MRI or superconducting collider was built. Release valves allow the boiling helium to escape, and resistor banks are used to draw off electrical energy from the system. However, their system wasn't sufficient to handle the level of failure that occured.