| ▲ | Heating homes with the largest particle accelerator(home.cern) |
| 60 points by elashri 7 hours ago | 19 comments |
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| ▲ | fph 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Bitcoin-mining space heaters are out, particle accelerator exhaust is now every nerd's most loved home heating. |
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| ▲ | Borealid an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Homes are routinely heated with the largest available particle accelerator - the sun. |
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| ▲ | mkw5053 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Interesting that they're still providing 1-5 MW during the multi-year shutdown. The LHC won't even be running but the cooling infrastructure keeps going. Makes me wonder what the steady-state thermal output is across all of CERN. 200 MW peak during operations, but clearly something substantial even when the collider is off. |
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| ▲ | clickety_clack 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I wonder if it’s to avoid thermal expansion, and maybe fatigue related to cycling of expansion and contraction. | | |
| ▲ | estimator7292 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, it's probably not good to let your miles and miles of superconducting magnets get warm and expand, even slightly. At the scale of the LHC you're probably looking at meters of displacement across the whole structure. |
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| ▲ | 1970-01-01 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Just need to find a way to recycle those 3.00TW beam dumps and they can claim they're a fancy, LEED certified green building. |
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| ▲ | nippoo 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | There's only about 400MJ of energy in each beam, so that's about 110kWh. The beam is dumped a couple of times a day - so it's on the order of a ~10kW continuous source if spread over the whole day. Which isn't nothing, but is about the same heat as generated by an average single datacentre rack... | | |
| ▲ | LeifCarrotson 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'd assume that the inputs to the system are far, far more than 10 kW continuously. I just ordered 4 servo motors for a modest-sized industrial machine that moves steel plates around to assemble construction equipment, each one is capable of about 8 kW. I'd be unsurprised if the particle accelerator complex generated waste heat on the order of 5 megawatts to generate a particle stream with an energy of 10 kilowatts. That's 0.2% efficient, pretty good! I bet just running the ceiling lights across the complex uses a lot more than 10 kW... |
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| ▲ | kakacik 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I wonder how they will pick which homes to heat or generally how to share that with general infrastructure. Also wonder how much will go to Switzerland (which has much denser housing in that part) and how much to France. I live not far, work in Geneva and have few colleagues living in/next to that circle. For sure they would appreciate using such source of heat if its frictionless integration. |
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| ▲ | ck2 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I had to check if maybe it was April 1st already but that's actually pretty clever and thoughtful |
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| ▲ | anon291 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| This is certainly not going to cause any conspiracy-minded nutjobs to go berserk. |
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| ▲ | RandomTeaParty 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | At least it's not SERN, with their time machine hackable by a microwave :) | |
| ▲ | nkrisc 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | They will happily find anything to be upset about. With people like that, it’s never about the specific conspiracy, they just need any conspiracy and so will invent one if necessary. | | |
| ▲ | lurk2 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > they just need any conspiracy and so will invent one if necessary. Sort of like people who read a story about district heating and then use the comment section to complain about the existence of a hypothetical group of conspiracy theorists. |
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| ▲ | stronglikedan 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's not CERN. They're really into CERN for some reason. | | |
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