Hawking Partly Wrong

NewsHammer Exclusive Peter Higgs with CERN's Tejinder Virdee and get-this: Under the hood of the giant solenoid CMS 12,500 tonne detector behind them you've got a radiator leaking water like a '72 Chevy. The new and mighty CMS, our favorite experiment, one of 4 beautiful cathedral-size detectors or reactors, but CERN won't call them that, has 272 zones of corrosion. Plus unlike any Chevy anywhere it even leaks its coolant directly into the engine. But that was December, a cold month, about 25 gallons or a 100 liters of water with the CMS plugged in, CMS On, spilling inside. See the candid report in the CMS Times, "CMS Winter Shutdown Adventure".

Don't worry, none of the 1,000,000 signal channels were affected. CERN didn't really say one way or the other, but not saying exactly anything at CERN always means there are no safety issues. Damage of course was minor. I suppose we are being asked to theorize a quick wipedown by CERN technicians insured a total recovery of all systems, even unaffected systems that might have been at risk. Though how did the technicians get inside? It took them 10.5 days to break in, a bit late for a quick wipedown. Though with a lot of official CERN hot air always present at the LHC, it could have been easily diverted directly into CMS. The blow-dry operation would be the intervention of choice for the "incident", as CERN hot air is considered very hot in comparison to other smaller collider PR.

CMS is maybe still down for 272 corrosion repairs due to other leaks, spotted once technicians got inside for the quick wipedown. A second burst pipe and flooding of the CMS Control Room two years running has been fixed again. 4,000 fault-prone connectors mistakenly installed in a new giant safety system, to replace an old system that failed in 2008, the nQPS or new Quench Protection System, have been replaced. That's why in part, the collider hasn't been going anywhere over the very long and bumpy "Technical Stop" since December in case you were wondering what happened to $10 Billion and 10,000 physicists trying to hitch a ride on the LHC Eurostar.

That's the latest from CERN, a fast train as an equivalent to an LHC beam. Not the power of 1700 Nuclear Power Plants, as discussed in "Fantastic LHC Energies May Be Higher Than Expected". By the way, the Two Mosquitoes Line, a long-running embarrassment bewildering even for collider kids, was shutdown and deleted from all CERN websites in a surprising retreat from CERN hot air physics. Looks like the CERN-EuroDisney merger is at a "Technical Stop".


Leaky CMS/ First Quantum Bench Test

Results not in.

Anyway, why leaks, especially water leaks in a new CMS that cost a fortune to build? The CMS gets very hot when it powers down. At its ordinary field strength of 3.8 Tesla it operates at about 18,000 Amps. It's supposed to power down gradually, but sometimes it can crash, like when there's a power failure. Then it can get hot enough to smoke.

During a crashdown test a couple of years ago, you could see a cloud of steam rising in a series of CERN photos which used to be available from CMS. That in itself could have damaged water lines and caused the later big spill and corrosion.

Other though unplanned "incidents" might have contributed:

Monday [August 3, 2009] at 2:19 PM, when a power cut on the CERN general network caused a slow discharge that turned into a fast dump a few seconds later. Investigations are ongoing to understand the switching from the preferred slow discharge to the faster dump which, while being a throughly tested part of the CMS operations, raises the temperature of the coil to 70K, thus requiring three days to cool down again to 4K before current can be injected again.

"5am 9 Nov [2009]: “Glitch” in CMS solenoid cryogenics system caused magnet to ramp down to 2.3T."

"[as of December 7, 2009] CERN power outage Tuesday night . . . trip of tracker cooling plant. . . . 3 or 4 cases . . . CMS solenoid magnet cryo dry compressors stopped. Field dropped from 3.8 T to 3.5 T. . . . slow current dump of CMS solenoid. Went down to 2.7 T. . . . Down most of today due to another power glitch"

Mounting Radiation Hazards In Cooling Water

Not that everything has been going smoothly. A lot of water is used as coolant at the LHC, including for some Septum Magnets that suffered heavy radiation damage and had to be replaced in 2004, "SEPTUM MAGNET MNP-23 FOR THE CERN PS EXPERIMENTAL AREA
AND ITS FAST INTERLOCK SYSTEM". With the recent revelations about mounting radiation hazards during collider operations, ignored for 10-15 years in ring tunnels according to Steve Meyers Head of Accelerators, in "Large Hadron Collider Waiting For Doomsday", it looks like some people in CERN Maintenance were well aware of the potential problems. Doesn't anybody at CERN read CERN docs?

That also means mounting radiation hazards in many LHC cooling water systems, including the colossal CMS solenoid surprisingly also partly cooled by water, and leaking too. Hope there's a new study and some action on this, before radioactive waste water finds itself in nearby Lake Geneva.

The LHC Collimator System where relatively exposed beams are focused is also cooled by water in part, though like in the CMS system it's hard to imagine an idea like this being approved by a CERN Committee of Experts. Here's the full January report from Chamonix, "Summary of the Collimation Upgrade Plans" and the smoking gun slide on P38.

Perhaps it's time for a little more foresight.

LHC On Target Again For Re-ReStart

Late January, February, Mid-February, March, February 20th (Official), February 25 (Rumor), After Monday but no firm date (Official, sometime after Monday February 22)

Jump to 3.5 TeV, no back to injection energy 0.45 TeV. Slow ramp? Not perfectly clear yet. A good idea I'd say. One of those 3.5 TeV beams will be very hard to handle if the collider has another bad day.

Next in NewsHammer, more on CMS in The Strange Case Of The Misbehaving Magnet At The LHC

--Alan Gillis

This is Part 3 of a series on machine safety and potential risks of expected Collider Objects like mBH at the LHC when the collider jumps to very high unknown energies this March. "Doomsday Report: New Physics At The LHC" will appear in The Science of Conundrums.

NewsHammer Part 1: Large Hadron Collider Waiting For Doomsday

NewsHammer Part 2: Fantastic LHC Energies May Be Higher Than Expected

NewsHammer Exclusive After a brief and successful restart this November, the Large Hadron Collider is on standby until March for more fixes and re-commissioning to higher energies. It's an uncharacteristic and surprising move by CERN, four years behind schedule and billions over budget on the $10 Billion collider, but a welcome go-slow approach to machine safety.

In September 2008 days after start-up a $40 Million accident crippled the LHC for over a year. Until the surprise winter break, CERN's objectives were for 3.5 TeV beams by the end of 2009 instead of the 1.18 TeV beams achieved, though with a bonus of some test collisions at a record 2.36 TeV.

Data highlights of CMS collisions have just been released in an article on MIT News. The big surprises were high numbers of mesons produced, and those numbers increased faster with collision energies, not predicted by models based on lower energy collisions at other colliders. CMS will publish its formal paper in the Journal of High Energy Physics.

Why Stop There? 2.36 TeV instead of 7 TeV

The abrupt end to commissioning in December at higher energies also surprised CERNies on site besides fans of the LHC. It wasn't because of the usual winter shutdown over the holidays. Safety concerns won over speed. Going to higher TeV meant jumping over another threshold in magnet powering, above 2,000 Amps. With so many magnets damaged last time during the 2008 busbar accident, Steve Meyers, CERN's #1 collider guy, decided to go slow again. Anyway the leaky CMS experiment and the faulty nQPS, the new Quench Protection System for the thousands of magnets, were also having trouble big time.

2010-2011 LHC Run 18-24 Months at 3.5 TeV per Beam

After a rethink last week at Chamonix, the collider's favorite ski resort, CERN has decided on going slower still. After current repairs and retrofits that should be completed by mid-February, now pushed ahead to March (don't ask) the LHC will aim for 3.5 TeV beams and 7 TeV collisions or 7 Tera or 7 Trillion Electron Volts, over the next 18 to 24 months, shutting down for lengthy major safety retrofits for possibly a year. Then in 2013 commissioning to 7 TeV per beam and 14 TeV collisions. Alarmingly sensible. Collider safety taking precedence? Congratulations, CERN.

Though potentially more dangerous heavy lead ion collisions, are now off the back burner and might start this Fall.

Unforeseen Radiation and $235 Million to $Billions More In Upgrades

More surprises at Chamonix. The end of January 5 day event, largely a study of safety at 5 TeV per beam, current LHC status of safety upgrades, and future safety upgrades, was more of the usual data avalanche. Here comes the check for the big holiday blowout.

Including new amazing unforeseen radiation hazards that will develop as the collider runs (Session 6--Radiation to Electronics) to deficiencies in the pre-accelerators (Session 8) including Electron Cloud trouble, and aging equipment and a need for higher energy injection beams with more bunches per beam or Billions More Dollars in upgrades. Maybe 100 Million Swiss Francs in civil engineering to move huge power supplies away from radiation zones, unknown but substantial costs to shield and/or redesign and replace equipment prone to radiation damage. Maybe at a minimum 1.3 or 1.4 Billion SF to upgrade pre-accelerators, probably much more if aging systems need full replacement. And more major upgrades to ventilation equipment including more ventilation shafts that were alarmingly inadequate for the 6 ton spill of Helium in 2008.

Here's the schedule and presentation abstracts including links to CERN docs and slides, "LHC Performance Workshop - Chamonix 2010". A "Summary of the ....", the webcast of February 5 and now a 2 part video from CERN, covers the main points made at Chamonix. Here's the abstract of the video, including links to docs cited and slides shown.

An important but informal end comment from the DG, Dr Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the new Director General of CERN since January 2009, didn't make it to video.

After Steve Meyers overview of radiation hazards developing and damaging equipment, to answer the big unspoken question hanging in the air, Meyers said:

"I think a declaration 10 or 15 years ago that the underground service areas in the LHC were non-radiation areas."

After Meyer's conclusions, Dr Heuer, sitting in his seat up front summed up his thoughts this way to the CERN audience:

"Instead of making decisions every 3 months, I prefer to have enough time to think it over."

A radical change from last year's we're good to go to 5 TeV per beam and gradual installation of more safety systems over the next 5 years. The estimate back in July for safety after $40 M in repairs was a whopping $235 Million extra in "LHC Status by Steve Meyers..." CERN video, still ignored by the media for safety the collider should have had before the accident of 2008. No CERN press release, that must be it. The new faster CERN schedule on safety upgrades will still mean spending the $235 M, while $1 to $2 Billion more on other upgrades thanks to the Chamonix review is now being considered. Hard to recall the LHC is a new collider.

One thing CERN forgot was the $1 Gazillion for Computer Systems Security including SCADA and Ethernet-Connected Instrumentation Systems. Why wait for the Trojans to attack?

All Ahead Slow: New Physics In Sight

If the LHC Machine is being re-engineered for more safety, it's the same old anything goes as to what the LHC might produce in terms of New Physics. Exciting not to know where physics is going, but hardly something to brag about. An army of the best minds in HEP don't have a clue? We're going to the Moon, but we might wind up on Mars or Venus or maybe we don't have enough thrust to go anywhere?

We've all read about it over and over again. Wow, the LHC is on the brink of answering the biggest questions in the Universe. Great. Where can I buy one? Or more realistically the LHC is an experiment with the unknown, with unknown consequences, with little in the way of safety studies and risk assessments.

As with design and engineering before the accident, CERN is still relying on its own considerable expertise in what will happen at the LHC with its experiments. It's what CERN doesn't do with all that expertise that raises some red flags on safety like not studying all the risk scenarios and not performing slow and difficult computer modeling of collider objects the LHC might produce and what they would do at the LHC.

CERN isn't worried, so why should we be? Well, CERN wasn't worried before the big accident CERN still calls "the incident". Accidents preventable, incidents happen. Now poised to go to extremely high energy collisions of 7 TeV as early as this March and ultimately to 14 TeV, the LHC may create objects like micro black holes that might threaten the planet.

--Alan Gillis

This is Part 1 of a report on machine safety and potential risks of expected Collider Objects like mBH at the LHC when the collider jumps to very high unknown energies this March. "Doomsday Report: New Physics At The LHC" will appear in The Science of Conundrums.

NewsHammer Part 2: Fantastic LHC Energies May Be Higher Than Expected