Heating homes with the largest particle accelerator

Posted by elashri 7 hours ago

Comments

Comment by fph 5 hours ago

Bitcoin-mining space heaters are out, particle accelerator exhaust is now every nerd's most loved home heating.

Comment by Borealid 1 hour ago

Homes are routinely heated with the largest available particle accelerator - the sun.

Comment by mkw5053 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by clickety_clack 5 hours ago

I wonder if it’s to avoid thermal expansion, and maybe fatigue related to cycling of expansion and contraction.

Comment by estimator7292 2 hours ago

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.

Comment by 1970-01-01 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by nippoo 3 hours ago

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...

Comment by LeifCarrotson 2 hours ago

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...

Comment by kakacik 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by mono442 4 hours ago

Mostly likely they'll supply heat to an existing district heating network.

Comment by lapetitejort 5 hours ago

They released a map [0] of their heating network. Maybe you can find your house on it?

[0]: https://images.fineartamerica.com/images/artworkimages/mediu...

Comment by ck2 5 hours ago

I had to check if maybe it was April 1st already

but that's actually pretty clever and thoughtful

Comment by anon291 6 hours ago

This is certainly not going to cause any conspiracy-minded nutjobs to go berserk.

Comment by RandomTeaParty 5 hours ago

At least it's not SERN, with their time machine hackable by a microwave :)

Comment by nkrisc 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by lurk2 2 hours ago

> 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.