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Revived LHC Could Run Through the Winter
Jack Spine writes "When you are powering nuclear particle beams that could drill a hole through 30 metres of copper, you don't want to be paying a premium for electricity. However, Cern scientists are determined that the delayed experiment will get some workable results, and so are preparing to run the machine throughout the winter."
Cern should be CERN, as it stands for "Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire"
I recall reading about the energy dump they use when they're done with the beam, and how it "fuzzifies" the beam before letting hit the thermal dump.
The beam wouldn't blow a huge crater in the copper, it doesn't have that much power, but it is very tightly focused, so it would drill a small hole 30 meters deep.
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The LHC uses a pulsed beam instead of a continuous one, so all the energy in a single pulse of the beam can drill a 30 meter hole though solid copper.
What they ended up doing is running the beam through a "fuzzifier" to make it's cross section larger, and then rapidly scanning it back and forth across a target of some very heat resistant material... either carbon or space shuttle tile type stuff. That way they're not blowing holes in their beam dump.
This may have to do with the fact that Fermilab could find the Higgs particle very soon, and then the LHC would have been scooped on its single most important reason for existing.
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This has been discussed previously on Slashdot. British writing often uses only initial-caps for pronounceable acronyms. The BBC is especially aggressive about this, resulting in things like "Nasa", which looks like a foreign name at first glance from an American eye. Why the BBC differentiates "BAFTA" from "NASA" in their style guide is a mystery to me; however, in recent BBC articles, it appears that the BBC is writing "Bafta" in actual practice.
BBC House Style and Writing Guidelines, September 2007 (in PDF or raw HTML):
Is it a slow news day or what?
I think I remember the article saying that the hole would be 30 meters in length and have a diameter a little smaller than a pencil. That's not an insubstantial amount of energy, by any means.
Cern should be CERN, as it stands for "Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire"
Actually it doesn't. The Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire was a provisional body created in 1952, and no longer exists. In 1954 the European Laboratory for Particle Physics was founded, and the C.E.R.N. was dissolved. The laboratory is named CERN, and although it is conventionally capitalised, it is not an acronym.
Maybe not that obvious.
Most major experiments shut down for at least a few months out of the year for scheduled maintenance and/or improvements. Additionally, most big projects don't have the funding to operate 24/7/365 -- cryo expenses are particularly staggering.
Given the amount of time it takes to warm/cool the LHC, it makes sense to schedule all of this maintenance all in one go. Once you're in that frame of mind, you can reschedule your operations to reduce electricity costs...and why wouldn't you?
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Well clearly they do have a concept of "the cost of lost opportunity" since they are running the thing over winter. CERN has a deal with a French power provider in which they are provided with power at reduced rates for most of the year, except for 22 days in winter. During this time the rate is very high. These are the days they are planning to run it anyway. Why did they make this deal?
Big experiments often require lots of scheduled maintenance for upgrades, repairs, fixing annoying design bugs that stop something from working properly. These can take time. It makes sense to schedule these during the period of time when the thing costs the most to operate. That is why experiments that draw large amounts of power will shut down sometimes during winter. They made this deal with Ãlectricité de France because it would save money in most scenarios.
In this case, the deal has cost money, which is unfortunate. Making the deal was still the right choice. Most of the time these kind of agreements save cash.
Your suggestion that it have it's own power plant is truly asinine. Why buy cheap commercial power when you can build your own plant for twice the price. These are particle physicists, they know particle physics, not power plant operation.