Heating homes with the largest particle accelerator | Hacker News Reader

Heating homes with the largest particle accelerator

home.cern

76 pointselashri29 comments

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

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.

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

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.

A superconducting magnet that gets above superconducting temperature is probably a pain to reset.

First, all the stored circulating current instantly turns into heat, spiking the temperature and boiling the remaining liquid helium coolant, which expands and explodes its container if you didn't give it a way out. If you did, it asphyxiates everyone in the tunnel. If you have really good ventilation in the tunnel, you still lost a bunch of expensive helium.

Second, you have to refill the cooling system and cool the magnets down again.

Third, you have to reinject the circulating current that makes the magnetic field.

There's probably more fractal–complexity practical concerns as well.

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

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.

Still better than 2.7 K you'd get without it.

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.

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

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...

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.

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...

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...

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?

Who is misunderstanding that?

Considering the top comment is a joke about Bitcoin mining, another a joke about the Sun, April Fools, conspiracy, and a question about what homes (obviously local), it seems like quite a few.

Or maybe I'm misreading and HN really is becoming Reddit because the thread is full of low quality comments off topic. I wasn't surprised to see most accounts are at most a few years old

HN has become Reddit since it was born. You may not comment about it. See the guidelines.

Maybe there's other people you should mention the guidelines to too

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

but that's actually pretty clever and thoughtful

Isn’t every heater technically a particle accelerator?

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

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

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.

I believe it is the other way around, they are already upset, but are confused towards why, so will take anything as the enemy.

> 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.

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

The LHC is a project of CERN

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

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