Hadron Collider Relaunch Delayed

SpuriousLogic writes "There's been another delay in the schedule announced for getting the Large Hadron Collider switched back on — now it's September 2009, a year after it shut down due to a malfunction. Scientists had said they expected the $5.4B machine to be repaired by November 2008, but then pushed the date back to June 2009, before the latest delay."

Comments

Re:Every night

[$RANDOMLUSER]

With an attitude like that, we'd still be using coal to heat our homes. Seriously, the money's already been spent, the staff is already on the payroll. The annual operating costs are a fraction of the construction costs. This being Slashdot, let's use a car analogy - you just bought a brand new Lexus for some serious, serious coin, but on the way home, you got a flat tire. Are you really not going to fix it in the interest of "saving money"?

Re:Dates back to the 1950s

[bucky0]

Let's rock-

Superconducting wires were a little-used oddity until the Tevatron (at Fermilab) caused enough demand to cause them to be commercially feasible to purchase a lot of it. After Tevatron got the wire it needed for magnets, GE (and others) used the newly developed manufacturing capacity to produce MRI machines. The research into superconducting wires and magnets has led to maglev trains and is being used to replace transmission lines in some instances (New York has a liquid nitrogen cooled superconducting transmission line). They're close to getting a formulation that doesn't use Yittrium (which is expensive). Considering ~half of the energy produced in a power plant (like your coal plants) are lost to resistive losses in transmission lines, it's good news for energy production.

A number of accelerators use their beams for clinical applications. (Usually by bombarding patients with ridiculously high fluxes of neutrons). Many accelerators use their beams to activate radioactive materials which are then later used in cancer treatment.

All the detectors used in high energy physics have _tons_ of uses ranging from medical applications to non-invasive scanning of cargo. Antineutrino detectors are used to verify that the cores of nuclear reactors haven't been tampered with.

By using ultra-sensitive detectors looking at flourescent bubbles, we've been able to fix many errors in our ideas of fluid dynamics. These detectors would've been unfeasible without the research performed to produce an accelerator.

Most of those things are things that were tangential to the actual goal of finding out the deeper mysteries of the universe, but just because people aren't going to build something out of the higgs boson, doesn't make the research worthless. If you looked at someone a while ago bombarding different metals with different wavelength X-Rays and called them an idiot, then you would've shut down the theory of electron bandgaps, the application of which is the foundation of all our modern conveniences.

anyway, back to work.