November 17th, 2008
Expensive repairs for Large Hadron Collider
So this Large Hadron Collider thing is a pretty sensitive piece of equipment. An electrical failure shut the great atom smasher down in September after only a few days on the job. It was supposed to be brought back online this month, but now, the BBC reports, the repairs will run to $21 million and take until next summer.
The fault occurred just nine days after it was turned on with Cern blaming the shutdown on the failure of a single, badly soldered electrical connection in one of its super-cooled magnet sections.
The collider operates at temperatures colder than outer space for maximum efficiency and experts needed to gradually warm the damaged section to assess it. “Now the sector is warm so they are able to go in and physically look at each of the interconnections,” CERN spokesman James Gillies told Associated Press.
