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The Recycling of the Tevatron
ananyo writes with an excerpt from an article in Nature about the decomissioning of the Tevatron: "It is a 4,000-tonne edifice that stands three stories high, chock full of particle detectors, power supplies, electronics and photomultiplier tubes, all layered like a giant onion around a cylindrical magnet. During 26 years of operation at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, this behemoth, the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF), helped to find the top quark and chased the Higgs boson. But since the lab's flagship particle collider, the Tevatron, was switched off in September 2011, the detector has been surplus stock — and it is now slowly being cannibalized for parts."
Currently other projects are taking small bits and pieces of the Tevatron, but another Fermilab project, ORKA, wants to gut the collider to study kaon decay.
Put it on eBay: "Create your own black hole!" Starting bid: $1 (no reserve)
The lack of funding for the Tevatron is deeply unfortunate. It almost certainly could still have been used for good research. Between this and the earlier cancellation of the SSC, the US seems to be doing its hardest to make sure that it isn't first in particle physics research. We're still doing a lot of good research at Fermilab. For example, MINOS is working on testing the recent FTL neutrino claim (and in fact, the OPERA group was paying careful attention to arrival times primarily because MINOS had previously discovered an anomaly which tentatively suggested that some neutrinos might be traveling faster than light). And the US is still doing very good physics in other areas, especially in solid state physics and plasma physics. But this a really bad trend. It fits into the same pattern as the recent budget cuts to Mars exploration, while we still have billions of dollars pumping into military boondoggles.
I'm happy that they can at least reuse the Tevatron, and kaon decay which is important for understanding CP violation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP_violation which may have implications for why there's apparently so much more matter than antimatter in the universe. But it really shouldn't be coming to this. Physicists shouldn't be desperately scrambling for parts while the cost of what they need is less than a new fighter squadron.
The US will be down to one active cyclotron-collider by the end of this year and not world class anymore. Some of the older accelerators have been recycled: Stanford Linear Accelerator where two of the quark mesons were discovered is now one of the worlds most powerful xray sources. This can see molecular size objects or time slices faster than a chemical reaction.
the US space program can no longer launch astronauts into orbit. Earliest will be next decade. Space probes have been cut to the two in development with nothing beyond that funded.
They always say, "Maybe I'll need it someday . . . ", or "I might be able to scavenge some parts . . ."
And the stuff just sits around forever . . . right next to my Token Ring network card, tangled up in cables with wacky connectors . . .
They just can't part with the Tevatron . . . this recycling line is just an excuse to keep it around.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
it's reusing. recycling would be scrapping the part and making it into something else
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
You know the three Rs of waste reduction? "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle", you and the GP are both talking about reusing. It's not the same as recycling, in fact it's better because it's more efficient.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
It decays at the same rate as one hand can clap.
I used to bike around the grounds of FNAL; I'd love to see them open up the tunnels and see a little of the other side!
Since it's in a rural area, I bet if the word got out, the meth heads would be all over it to steal the copper. It would end up looking like one of those old abandoned military sites in Russia.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"