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Are you ready for the end of the world?

What will be said when the protons collide?

  • Total voters
    23
Collider weathers power cut - Cosmic Log - msnbc.com

Europe's Large Hadron Collider was knocked offline today due to a faulty electrical cable, just a couple of days after the accelerator broke the world record for proton-smashing power. Electrical power was restored within hours, with no major effect on LHC operations, according to the CERN particle-physics center.

"Even as we speak, they are still trying to get beam back to the LHC," CERN spokeswoman Katie Yurkewicz told me just before 3 p.m. ET (9 p.m. Geneva time).

She said the bad cable tripped an 18-kilovolt circuit breaker that served part of CERN's power supply network. The good news is that the outage did not affect the part of the system that powers the LHC's supercooled magnet system. The bad news is that it brought down the main computer system at CERN's headquarters in Meyrin, just outside Geneva, as well as the equipment that injects beams of protons into the LHC's underground ring.

That meant many of CERN's Web sites became temporarily inaccessible, and LHC operations were halted. Even when power was restored and all the equipment was back up and running, the LHC's operators had to put the system through a checkout to make sure it was safe to resume shooting proton beams through the ring.

The outage was nowhere near as serious as the blowup that damaged the LHC's cooling system in September 2008, shortly after the collider was turned on. It took more than a year to repair that damage and upgrade the facility's safety system, building up to the LHC's restart late last month.

Today's electrical glitch, which came to light on the LHC Portal discussion forum, was more like a power cut that occurred a month ago. That outage was blamed on a bird that apparently dropped a soggy piece of bread onto a power substation. This one was traced to a break in cable insulation that caused a short circuit, Yurkewicz said.

She stressed that today's setback was nothing out of the ordinary, particularly during the shakedown phase for a facility designed for peak power consumption of 120 megawatts. "This is the sort of thing that happens at accelerators," Yurkewicz said.
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sparkchaser said:
Is this more to your liking?
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Hi Sparky,
Naw. I was thinking more of the simple-minded cartoon-like pictures that are used to explain complicated things -- like what happened -- to the uneducated ununderstanding simpletons like myself who don't know the difference between a quark and a fark, or a hadron and a schmadron.
Just a nice little drawing of the thing they were looking for, and whether they found it or not.
Ya know. Simple -- like for our elected representatives. :whistling:
 
Bad insulation on a wire caused a short and tripped a breaker. I can draw a picture if it will help.
 
Totally off topic but breaker related: somewhere I have pics of the aftermath of a breaker explosion. I should look for that.

Ah! Found them. This is what happens when a breaker explodes. Nobody was injured. (Note: these images are not from the LHSC. They are from a power plant.)

ai5.photobucket.com_albums_y187_sparkchaser1998_SONGS_20Blown_20Breaker_IMAGE03.jpg
ai5.photobucket.com_albums_y187_sparkchaser1998_SONGS_20Blown_20Breaker_IMAGE05.jpg
ai5.photobucket.com_albums_y187_sparkchaser1998_SONGS_20Blown_20Breaker_IMAGE06.jpg
ai5.photobucket.com_albums_y187_sparkchaser1998_SONGS_20Blown_20Breaker_IMAGE08.jpg
 
sparkchaser said:
Bad insulation on a wire caused a short and tripped a breaker. I can draw a picture if it will help.
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Sparky,
We're talking on different tracks; I should have been clearer. I meant I was snoring until they get their act together and finally say all the kinks are out and it is working. At which point I'll only be interested in answers to two questions:

Did the experiment work?

How do you know? (Show me with a simple picture).

I'm sure they will have a few million well chosen words to go along with all the hoopla at that point, but I'd like to have a simple layman's description of what the results were (or weren't). They surely know what they are trying to accomplish, apart from just building it.

It's the ages-old project manager's question:

Did you accomplish what you set out to do?
If so, show me.
If not, why not?

It doesn't take a genius to ask the questions, or to understand the answers.

And PS that was quite a short circuit! :eek:
 
If the world is planning to end,I would appreciate it if it ends after March.:whistling:
 
Peder said:
We're talking on different tracks; I should have been clearer. I meant I was snoring until they get their act together and finally say all the kinks are out and it is working.
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Ah. Next time, be clearer. After all:

Peder said:
Wake me up for the pictures.
/snoring by now/
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Can be taken to mean just about anything. :flowers:




Peder said:
It doesn't take a genius to ask the questions, or to understand the answers.
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I really don't agree with the second half of that statement. Sometimes it does take a genius to understand the answers.
 
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