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World's largest particle accelerator begins warming thousands of local French residents with waste energy from the 16-mile Large Hadron Collider (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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The world’s largest particle accelerator now has an important new mission: heating thousands of homes. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN has begun to funnel the waste heat from its cooling system to a new residential and commercial area in the nearby French town of Ferney-Voltaire, with the new linkup expected to be able to heat several thousand homes at once.

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[–] 45 points 9 months ago (3 children)

They say if you stand in the middle of the LHC, you'll be warm for the rest of your life...

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    • [–] 97 points 9 months ago (6 children)

    The headline makes it sound like this is unintentional.

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  • [–] 42 points 9 months ago (4 children)

    It must be some sort of base pessimism thing. My automatic assumption was that it was benevolent and intentional.

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  • [–] 19 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    It might be about general knowledge of how colliders work, the sentence structure does it no favours, but half way through I realised it had to be intentional/beneficial due to knowing the only possible way a collider generates heat as a byproduct.

    Where as someone that doesn't know much about colliders might read that sentence and assume it's like radiative heat or something.

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    • [–] 25 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    We must stop the Organization, SERN.

    El. Psy. Congroo.

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    • [–] 9 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    I've been playing Steins;Gate while snowed in and now super apprehensive about anything CERN related lol

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    • [–] 24 points 9 months ago (5 children)

    This thing has been running for over 15 years and they just figured out they could use the waste heat?

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  • [–] 19 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    It's not really the same thing today as it was 15 years ago. It also hasn't been running continuously that whole time. They regularly stop experimenting to build new extensions onto it.

    I visited the LHC back in 2019 and at the time they were expanding it even then.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    I doubt you can answer but did it just become economically viable?

    I'd bet it was viable earlier and someone just figured this out.

    Makes me wonder recycling the heat from AI data centers.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago*

    recycling the heat from AI data centers

    I'd say the govts should make it mandatory for anyone making a large enough data centre, to create a heat transfer infrastructure to nearby localities. The locals can then buy hot water (metered) via pipelines from the local govt and that can go towards paying for the power extension tax that the data centre has to pay.
    Oh yes, there needs to be a power extension tax first, which is levied on anyone setting up data centres to use for wasteful stuff like AI, Crypto-mining etc. Of course, that only matters if they are taking power from the grid and/or building near populated areas (any amount of population).

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    • [–] 6 points 9 months ago

    THE LOOP MUST FLOW

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    [–] 18 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    I know this is probably a mundane engineering thing, but it sounds like a ramp up to a Black Mirror episode. We just need some kind of social commentary. Maybe the waste energy secretly contain MacGuff-ons, a known chrono-hazard. Only the poorest people will use it, for lack of alternative?

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    • [–] 12 points 9 months ago (5 children)

    Wait until the people find out that the waste heat is contained in liquid hydrogen at 3 kelvin.

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  • [–] 29 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    the waste heat comes from cryogenics system that keeps all of this helium at below 3K. turns out you need to spend a lot of energy to cool down things to temperatures this low

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  • [–] 11 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Yes, well Mr. Smartypants, did you consider that maybe Mr. Freeze and his family were living in Ferney-Voltaire instead of your 'technically correct' explanation?!

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    • [–] 15 points 9 months ago* (1 child)

    So random French households have portals summoning demons? Damn, I wish I was French.

    Joke, of course I didn't wish I was French. But a demon portal would be awesome in my house though.

    (I'm referencing to the comspiracy of Cern using the hedron collider to summon Osiris from the underworld)

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    • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    Who let the worlds largest particle accelerator steal excess heat from the LHC??

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