CERN LHC = danger?

These are informations I found about the LHC System specifications:

* Particles used: Protons (in proton- proton collisions) and then somewhat later heavy ions (Lead, full stripped 82+)
* Circumference: 26,659 m.
* Injector: SPS
* Injected beam energy: 450 GeV (protons)
* Nominal beam energy in physics: 7 TeV (protons)
* Magnetic field at 7 TeV: 8.33 Tesla
* Operating temperature: 1.9 K
* Number of magnets: ~9300
* Number of main dipoles: 1232
* Number of quadrupoles: ~858
* Number of correcting magnets: ~6208
* Number of RF cavities: 8 per beam; Field strength at top energy ≈ 5.5 MV/m
* RF frequency: 400.8 MHz
* Revolution frequency: 11.2455 kHz.
* Power consumption: ~120 MW
* Gradient of the tunnel: 1.4%
* Difference between highest and lowest points: 122 m.

Below some informations I found about the LHC Project Team Structure:

The LHC accelerator component production, construction and installation is coordinated by the LHC project.

The main departments at CERN are which are closely involved:

The Accelerator Technology [AT] department is responsible for:

* the production and testing of the magnets,
* cryogenics,
* vacuum.

The Accelerator and Beams [AB] department is responsible for beam related hardware such as:

* Power converters,
* Radio Frequency,
* Beam Instrumentation,
* Controls
* and Operations.

The Technical Support [TS] department which is responsible for:

* civil engineering
* installation & logistics
* survey
* technical infrastructure

This is a list of facts I found on the LHC:

The LHC is installed in a tunnel 3.8 m. in diameter, buried 50 to 175 m. below ground. The tunnel straddles the French-Swiss border to the North-West of Geneva.

Two counter rotating beams are injected into the LHC from the SPS accelerator (the Super Proton Synchrotron).

The proton beams are injected at 450 GeV and then accelerated to 7 TeV.

The beam moves around the LHC ring inside a continuous vacuum chambers which pass through a large number of magnets.
1232 dipole magnets bend the beam around the 27 km. ring. The momentum of the beam is very high and these magnets have to produce a very strong magnetic field.

To reach the high magnetic field required, high currents are needed. To avoid excessive resistive losses, the magnets are superconducting. A huge cryogenics system is required to produce the liquid helium needed to keep the magnets cold.

The cables of the magnets are of a very special design and conduct current without resistance in their superconducting state

The beams will be stored at high energy for 10 to 20 hours (with a bit of luck). In 10 hours the particles make four hundred million revolutions around the machine. During this time collisions take place inside the four main LHC EXPERIMENTS.

Wednesday, January 04, 2006
The LHC Will Be a Stillborn

Quote from the cosmicvariance blog at http://cosmicvariance.blogspot.com/2006/01/lhc-will-be-stillborn.html

It says:
'Mark at the CosmicVariance.com just wrote about the LHC, as it was reported by BBC. So I am going to say a few things.

My prediction is nothing will come out of LHC. It will be a still birth. I based my prediction on information revealed by this article, which was first meantioned by Lubos. What did the article say? It said that they were planning to shut the LHC down for half of the year and operate only half of the year to save electricity cost.

In view that despite of the huge cost overrun during the construction of LHC, member states REFUSED to increase the budget and CERN had to cut corners some where else and borrow money through 2010 to get the machine built. And in view that a global energy crisis is looming. My conclusions is by the time LHC is finished, the electricity price will be so high that CERN simply do not have the budget to pay electricity bill to run the machine. Mean while, do not expect any budget increase from member states. The top priority for national governments will be to concentrate resources to research alternative energy source to deal with the energy crisis, budget for high energy physics research will be greatly reduced, not increased.'

Then continues with:
From CERN provided information. We know it consumes 200 mega watts of electricity, equivalent to half of the consumption rate of the whole Geneva City. Running the machine for one year would consume 1.75 billion kilowatt*hour of electricity. The electricity now in USA costs almost 12 cents per kwh, almost double the figure less than 2 years ago. By the time LHC is really to do some real physics experiments, I expect electricity could cost as much as half a dollar per kwh. That would put the electricity cost at 0.88 billion dollars per year. That alone is already more than CERN's annual budget.

This is a quote from the wikipedia:

'The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a particle accelerator located at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland. It lies in a tunnel under France and Switzerland.

It is currently in the final stages of construction, and commissioning, with some sections already being cooled down to its final operating temperature of ~2K (−271°C). The first beams are due for injection mid June 2008 with the first collisions planned to take place 2 months later.[1] The LHC will become the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator.[2] The LHC is being funded and built in collaboration with over two thousand physicists from thirty-four countries as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories.

Technical design
Superconducting quadrupole electromagnets are used to direct the beams to four intersection points where interactions between protons will take place.
Superconducting quadrupole electromagnets are used to direct the beams to four intersection points where interactions between protons will take place.

The collider is contained in a circular tunnel with a circumference of 27 kilometres (17 mi) at a depth ranging from 50 to 175 metres underground.[6] The tunnel, constructed between 1983 and 1988,[7] was formerly used to house the LEP, an electron-positron collider.

LHC Accelerators

Prior to being injected into the main accelerator, the particles are prepared through a series of systems that successively increase the particle energy levels. The first system is the linear accelerator Linac2 generating 50 MeV protons which feeds the Proton Synchrotron Booster (PS. Protons are then injected at 1.4 GeV into the Proton Synchrotron (PS) at 26 GeV. Finally the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) can be used to increase the energy of protons up to 450 GeV.

Cost

The construction of LHC was originally approved in 1995 with a budget of 2.6 billion Swiss francs, with another 210 million francs (140 M€) towards the cost of the experiments. However, cost over-runs, estimated in a major review in 2001 at around 480 million francs (300 M€) in the accelerator, and 50 million francs (30 M€) for the experiments, along with a reduction in CERN's budget pushed the completion date out from 2005 to April 2007.[12] 180 million francs (120 M€) of the cost increase has been the superconducting magnets.

Safety concerns
This article or section is in need of attention from an expert on the subject.
Please help recruit one or improve this article yourself. See the talk page for details.
Please consider using {{Expert-subject}} to associate this request with a WikiProject

Concerns have been raised that performing collisions at previously unexplored energies might unleash new and disastrous phenomena. These include the production of micro black holes, and strangelets. Such issues were raised in connection with the RHIC accelerator, both in the media[14][15] and in the scientific community;[16] however, after detailed studies, scientists reached such conclusions as "beyond reasonable doubt, heavy-ion experiments at RHIC will not endanger our planet"[17] and that there is "powerful empirical evidence against the possibility of dangerous strangelet production."[18]

URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider