[HN Gopher] Heating homes with the largest particle accelerator
___________________________________________________________________
Heating homes with the largest particle accelerator
Author : elashri
Score : 60 points
Date : 2026-01-29 15:49 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (home.cern)
(TXT) w3m dump (home.cern)
| anon291 wrote:
| This is certainly not going to cause any conspiracy-minded
| nutjobs to go berserk.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| It's not CERN. They're really into CERN for some reason.
| gilbertbw wrote:
| The LHC is a project of CERN
| madcaptenor wrote:
| and this is coming from a URL on the home.cern domain
| nkrisc wrote:
| 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.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > 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.
| RandomTeaParty wrote:
| At least it's not SERN, with their time machine hackable by a
| microwave :)
| ck2 wrote:
| I had to check if maybe it was April 1st already
|
| but that's actually pretty clever and thoughtful
| fph wrote:
| Bitcoin-mining space heaters are out, particle accelerator
| exhaust is now every nerd's most loved home heating.
| mkw5053 wrote:
| 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.
| clickety_clack wrote:
| I wonder if it's to avoid thermal expansion, and maybe fatigue
| related to cycling of expansion and contraction.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| 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.
| kakacik wrote:
| 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.
| lapetitejort wrote:
| 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...
| mono442 wrote:
| Mostly likely they'll supply heat to an existing district
| heating network.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| 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.
| nippoo wrote:
| 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...
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| 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...
| Borealid wrote:
| Homes are routinely heated with the largest available particle
| accelerator - the sun.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-01-29 23:01 UTC)