Revived LHC Could Run Through the Winter 164
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."
I don't mean to nitpick... (Score:2, Informative)
Cern should be CERN, as it stands for "Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire"
Re:I don't mean to nitpick... (Score:5, Insightful)
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E, CERN is pretty commonly referred to around here. We talk about the impressive multi-national project all of the time. A moment of editing would have saw that error.
I know this, because I'm very drunk right now. If an inebriated AC can see that, I would at least hope that an editor would.
Then again, I'm new here.
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Re:I don't mean to nitpick... (Score:5)
E, CERN is ...
Shouldn't that be 'e'?
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Shouldn't that be 2.7182818...?
Re:I don't mean to nitpick... (Score:5, Informative)
He didn't just try to nitpick. He actually did it. Get it straight truncated e.
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Actually, the British follow the universal practice of properly capitalizing acronyms. The literate ones do anyways.
As such, no the writing style is not correct.
British capitalization of acronyms (Score:5, Informative)
This has been discussed previously on Slashdot [slashdot.org]. 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 [bbc.co.uk] or raw HTML [bbc.co.uk]):
Re:British capitalization of acronyms (Score:4, Informative)
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Actually, the British follow the universal practice of properly capitalizing acronyms.
It's not very universal if others have different rules. In particular, many American publications use small caps [wikipedia.org] for acronyms such as NASA or CERN.
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If Chaucer read Shakespeare, he would have thought Shakespeare was butchering the language. If Shakespeare read Dickens, Shakespeare would have thought Dickens had butchered the language.
Language evolves. Saying one rule-based system, (this doesn't apply to colloquialisms or slang) is "butchered" is just a modern day form of prejudice.
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So I ken mek mi oon ruulz, nt bi gutt? Grhaythe!
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Wouldn't the British version be something like CERouN?
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Yes that's the proper spelling, and it's a damn shame that you ignorant yankees can't spell it correctly.
Re:I don't mean to nitpick... (Score:5, Funny)
CEPLARN (Conseil Europeen Pour LA Recherche Nucleaire) would be a cooler name, it sounds vaguely Klingon.
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Re:I don't mean to nitpick... (Score:5, Funny)
Hmm... so that's where he got them...
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And I thought CINCLANTFLT was cool...
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CINCLANTFLT = Commander in Chief, US Atlantic Fleet
CIN = Commander in Chief,
CL = ??? wth?
ANT = Atlantic
FLT = Fleet
The first part is an acronym the rest is just garbage and then for one word they just dropped the vowels.
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No, no... you got it all wrong. It's
Classless Idiot Nitpicking Comically Lame AC, Now Trolling Fascinatingly Lame 'Tard.
Or was it this new weapon? The
Colossus Isotope Nuclear Cannon Linked Annihilation Nationwide Terror and Fear Launching Tank?
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CINC = Commander-in-Chief
LANT = atLANTic
FLT = Fleet
As opposed to CINCPACFLT, of course.
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I read that as FATSOSTRAGICRAPRHUBARBWITHTUPAC. So the NAVY killed them! Who would have known...
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I guess they are routinelly too close to Cthulhu. Or habe large Mayan ancestry...
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It stands for: Fleet aviation specialized operatonal training group pacific
Correct. Otherwise known as "that infinite series of P3C Orion sub chasers doing touch and goes just next to our apartment in Mountain View". Moffet NAS. It was on a sign I walked past on the way to work one year.
I nitpick your nitpick (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Odd... (Score:3, Interesting)
They were normally going to be closed during the winter?
Re:Odd... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Odd... (Score:5, Funny)
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That's true, they can't read directions for shit.
Re:Odd... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Odd... (Score:4, Funny)
I should clarify that when I say "I guess", what I mean is that it's in the damn article as well as being good old common sense. I suppose if you didn't read before posting (9 paragraphs is too long?) and you don't have common sense ...
... well then you'd be on /., right?
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Power being more expensive in the winter is only common sense if you pay your own power bill...
Something he probably doesn't have to do living in his mother's basement...
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That or living much much closer to the equator in which case you may not have ever needed heat...
An understatement if ever there was. Many of the cars I have seen in Malaysia don't even have a a switch for the aircon.
Re:Odd... (Score:5, Insightful)
We are not going to shut down LHC for the winter due to high electricity costs. If it never occured to you that we would, since the apparatus and the staff would seemingly cost so much more than the electricity anyways, congratulations, it turns out you were right even when we didn't know it yet, thus we will be running the collider and everything is exactly as you would have assumed had you never read this article at all. Thanks for your time.
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Re:Odd... (Score:5, Funny)
Translation: "Fuck! D-zero [wikipedia.org]'s collected like 6 inverse femtobarns [wikipedia.org] of integrated luminosity and we're just sitting on our asses looking at cosmic ray hits!!! Who gives a shit about power $$$?! Switch the fucker on!!"
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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?
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That cool down phase is on winter because the electricity is of much higher price at that time (this is not some village in Minnesota, this is in Switzerland and due to everyone having the heating on in winter, the electricity price is much higher in that period).
Minnesota is very cold in the winter. Colder than Switzerland, on average.
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The accelerator takes months to warm up and begin the experiments and it needs to cool down after running them.
Erm. No. You've got it backwards. The bending and focusing magnets on the ring are superconducting, and as such, need to be kept at cryogenic temperatures. So, the accelerator takes about a month (IIRC) to warm up to go into the tunnels and do maintenance, and then has to be (very expensively) cooled back down to liquid nitrogen temperatures in order to function. Credentials: IAAPP, working on CDF.
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First, it wouldn't necessarily be common sense. My electric does not cost significantly more during the winter. For the others and their fun with speculation, my heat is paid for out of my monthly association fees, and it's a gas bill, not electric.
The point, however, is that I did read the article (it was in the summary too smartass), and I'm surprised that the LHC wouldn't run during the winter even if the power is more expensive. We're talking about, what, a 9 billion dollar facility? They're worried
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Core bit I think you are missing is that it takes a lot of energy to cool all the necessary parts down to near absolute zero (I believe I read somewhere that it takes a couple weeks to do the initial chill at least). I imagine the cost to keep it running (with or w/o ongoing injections) is less due to the initialization sequence, as it were.
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Actually your supplier is paying differing amounts for power because at wholesale level, it is demand driven.
Again, as you use gas, so does everybody else and not only does your consumption increase when the weather cools down, but the overall demand pushes the price of gas up. Since some power is gas generate
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Everywhere I have ever lived, power costs substantially more in the summer, allegedly because of air conditioning (but around here it's probably because of arc lamps.)
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Yep, air-con is a serious consumer of power, but I'm living in central Europe at the moment so we don't often have it, let alone use it in domestic premises. Shops, hotels and some other businesses may use it.
Power for the retail customer here seems to be the same over a 12 month period. For a serious user, the power price comes down to whatever you manage to negotiate. The price is set in hourly chunks and is negotiated up to several months ahead.
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Mods: Engage humor detectors (Score:5, Funny)
Unfortunately in the southern hemisphere the spin is reversed, which could result in the anti-god particle. They'll play with black holes, but there are limits to their hubris.
The next version is the Trans-equator Hadron Collider (THC) which will circle the equator and have a branch that passes through the core in an attempt to discover stuff that's like, really cool, man. Here's a diagram. [wikimedia.org]
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electric heaters aren't very popular in europe.
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That thing costs how many billions, and they shut it down because of higher electricity rates?
I thought it would have its own power generators.
What's the total cost of ownership compared to the cost of power?
I guess they don't have the concept of "the cost of lost opportunity"
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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
Can't it power itself in winter? (Score:2)
With all it's magnets and electricity usage, you can't convince me they are anywhere near efficient enough to NOT generate loads of waste heat. In the winter -- especially during those '22 days', when electricity is at a premium, I suspect it has a good deal to due with those being the shortest and among the coldest days of winter. That means during the time of highest electrical cost, they are also likely to have the coldest outdoor temperatures.
There is a high amount of power going into the facility. T
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Yes, that's standard. Electricity costs are enormous there in the winter, and most personnel want to go on vacation anyway, so they shut down most of the buildings and stop any experiments.
This year is an exception
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I am currently working in IT at the trading arm of a major European energy supplier. Large variations in seasonal power demands are normal. Major consumers often attempt to hedge their consumption on the market (they may also link to the weather indices as one element is clearly ambient temperature).
Normally, reserves have to be used over the winter peaks. One of Cern's suppliers, EDF uses a lot of nuclear but that tends to run at a fairly constant rate. Power tends to get balanced by the use of hydroelectr
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LHC Could Run Through the Winter ... (Score:5, Funny)
Or till Earth is destroyed. Whichever comes first...
Re:LHC Could Run Through the Winter ... (Score:5, Funny)
They've spotted Gordon Freeman running around the LHC.
http://skipsjunk.net/linked-pics/LHC_Gordon-Freeman_2.JPG [skipsjunk.net]
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And as we know from "In Soviet Russia..." and other decade-old medium quality jokes (back then) still spreading, we can't tell SHIT from good jokes, around here. ^^
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To nitpick your signature, shouldn't it be that the probability approaches 1?
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Doing a quick back of the envelope calculation I get the decay time for something the mass of the Earth (6 x 10^24 kg) at 5 x 10^50 years. The universe is only billions (10^9) of years old so this is considerably longer than the age of the universe.
A black hole the mass of a carbon atom on the other hand (3 x 10^-26 kg) I get 2 x 10^-93 s. What meaning can be attributed to this result is unclear since this is far shorter than the Planck time.
In short a Earth sized black hole is going to be around for a long
heh heh (Score:2, Funny)
I'm a tag
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Also a shitty (though somewhat underrated, IMO) Schwarzenegger flick.
Great! (Score:2)
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Asshat, if a black hole went anywhere near us, the whole world would be compressed into a singularity. STUPID!
And if all inane Slashdot comments were somehow rendered in new matter, we would soon achieve three solar masses ourselves* and become our own planetary black hole.
*I'm working on it. I'm on a diet, ok?
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So what will cause the delay next time? (Score:5, Funny)
I can't find the paper on Google though, I really need to read it it'll help me figure out why the time machine I'm building doesn't work.
Thrice Upon A Time (Score:2)
Thank you! (Score:2)
I've been trying forever to remember the title of that book.
Sadly, my copy seems to have vanished from my bookshelves as well. (Hmm. This can't be a good sign...)
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Well, so far, your memory seems to be correct. Has it started running yet or is it still being re-cooled or re-heated or re-blasted or re-started or whatever it is I always seem to re-read about articles regarding the LHC.
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You didn't want me to tell you this, but you found it, built the machine, and caused a disaster, then went back and made it so you wouldn't find the paper.
competition with Fermilab (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:competition with Fermilab (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, Fermilab is unable to probe the highest possible mass ranges of the Higgs. Not without running indefinitely, that is.
The LHC is capable of this, probably by the end of next year we'll have either fully excluded or discovered the Higgs. And a bunch of other stuff
The biggest reason to run through winter is so that we can better understand the experiment. More run time = more interesting stuff for physicists to do! The more time we run uninterrupted, the more quickly we'll be able to fine tune the instruments.
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Re:competition with Fermilab (Score:5, Insightful)
This is absurd. We're talking about the cutting edge of physical discovery, and you're complaining about cost? The total cost is a few billion, and it has been spread out over 15 years.
It might make the most startling discoveries in scientific history, but apparently that's not important!
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that Swiss got most of the EU money
How does that matter? If they build most of the LHC, they get most of the money. Simple, isn't it?
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Switzerland is a member of CERN you tit.
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Actually in Europe the average PhD duration is more like 3 years. I know a few people who have passed through CERN and gone while doing their PhDs.
We announced this over 6 months ago (Score:4, Informative)
Is it a slow news day or what?
Stop! (Score:2)
So soon? (Score:2)
Let's see how Duke Nukem Forever [wikipedia.org] does first...
Eveything can drill trough 30m of copper. (Score:2)
You just have to give it the time.
Without a value of time, that statement is useless.
what if they accidentally make some "red matter"? (Score:2)
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Why ask for 1 trillion when we can ask for 1 billion? *raises pinky*
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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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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.
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I read some while ago that the LHC was the first particle accelerator powerful enough to basically destroy itself if the beam was dumped directly into the walls.
The energy stored in the entire beam will be [web.cern.ch] around 350MJ, which, if I did the conversion correctly, is equivalent to about 83kg TNT. Of course it won't be able to dump all of it in an instant (at least not in the same location), but I imagine it could still be quite destructive if it fails.
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because there are many ways to determine if it is winter, but the most reliable is looking for polar bears.
If you see one it's winter.
Do you see one?
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