Heating homes with the largest particle accelerator

[fph]

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

[mkw5053]

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]

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

[Borealid]

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

[yetihehe]

I have not seen sun for a week recently due to cloud cover. And -10°C inside is not a good temperature, while mathematically I still get several hundred watts from sun just hitting my home, but due to -20°C outside and wind, my heavily insulated home still loses about 3kW of heat on average to environment.

[kakacik]

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.

[mono442]

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

[lapetitejort]

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...

[1970-01-01]

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.

[nippoo]

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...

[godelski]

People seem to be misunderstanding what's going on here. Running the particle accelerator generates a lot of heat and thus needs a pretty large scale cooling system. What this is saying is instead of dumping the heat into the atmosphere pump it towards homes.

Is this a good source of heating? I mean yeah, the heat is being generated anyways. Should you build a particle accelerator to heat homes? Fuck no. But if you already have one, why not?

[direwolf20]

Who is misunderstanding that?

[ck2]

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

but that's actually pretty clever and thoughtful

[pfannkuchen]

Isn’t every heater technically a particle accelerator?

[anon291]

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

[RandomTeaParty]

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

[nkrisc]

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.

[stronglikedan]

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