Heating homes with the largest particle accelerator

(home.cern)

41 points | by elashri 4 hours ago ago

14 comments

  • fph 2 hours ago

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

  • mkw5053 2 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.

    • clickety_clack 2 hours ago

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

  • 1970-01-01 an hour 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.

  • ck2 2 hours ago

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

    but that's actually pretty clever and thoughtful

  • kakacik 2 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.

  • anon291 3 hours ago

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

    • nkrisc 2 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.

    • RandomTeaParty an hour ago

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

    • stronglikedan 3 hours ago

      It's not CERN. They're really into CERN for some reason.

      • gilbertbw 2 hours ago

        The LHC is a project of CERN

        • madcaptenor 2 hours ago

          and this is coming from a URL on the home.cern domain