Ortega-Starfire writes "A 30-ton transformer in the Large Hadron Collider malfunctioned, requiring complete replacement on the day the LHC came online. No one at CERN reported any problems, and they only released this data once the Associated Press sent people to investigate rumors of problems. I guess it's hard to just sweep a 30-ton transformer breaking under the rug."
by Anonymous Coward
on Thursday September 18 2008, @08:47PM (#25065255)
I have been bestowed with mod points almost continuously for the past month(5 or 6 times anyways). Sadly, since I don't mod down, I have barely used them since the comment quality is nearing that of digg...
Someone say something insightful PLEASE!
I'll readily admit that Slashdot has gone down hill a bit in the last few years, but it's nowhere near as bad as digg. Seriously. Trolling on digg is like pissing in an ocean of piss, the comments are so bad.
I mean this as no insult to digg, but the comments on the articles (and most of the articles themselves) are absolute shit. Most of the people commenting are - by their own admission - highschoolers and young college kids. With Slashdot, at least there's some pretense of being accurate and factual in the comments - users who troll or make ill-informed posts are usually modded down or corrected by other users.
In summary, I submit to you a summary of the current digg RSS feed as evidence of article and community quality on digg -
3 newbie-oriented or otherwise obvious Linux articles
4 pro-Obama articles.
4 anti-McCain/Palin articles.
3 YouTube/Break.com video submissions
5 "list" articles (e.g. - "Top 10 Drinks Real Men Don't Order")
3 image articles (article is just a link to a single image.)
2 articles that Slashdot covered earlier this week.
The above is but a small sample of the typical digg feed. Oddly, there aren't any "Marijuana will cure everything and it's 'big pharma' keeping it illegal maaaaaan" articles in the feed, but I'm sure those will trickle in as the day goes on.
Seriously. Digg is fucking retarded. Hang out there for a week and tell me Slashdot has approached that level of stupidity or redundancy.
I TOLD YOU! Why wouldn't anyone listen? See what happens when the LHC opened a warp hole to Cybertron? Now they'll come back for vengeance, and they won't care if they're autobot or decepticon, for this dispicable act. They'll know that I stood against the LHC, and they'll ensure that I have a place in rounding up you for work in their salt mines. I for one welcome our robotic overlords.
The summary reads like it's some kind of attempted cover up. Maybe it's because they thought that an equipment failure wasn't exactly news? The little accelerator I use has been down for a week because of a borked turbo pump. Should I phone Reuters?
It's a big, complicated machine - shit breaks. It gets fixed. I wouldn't worry about it unless you're waiting for beam time.
The webcam is a great source of information on CMS:), but if you want to know the status of the LHC, check the following links:
The current status of the beam can always be viewed here [web.cern.ch]
All other status informations are linked from here [web.cern.ch]
So maybe they didn't make a press release, but perhaps journalists should be smart enough to find these pages instead of claiming conspiracies?
They're not trying to cover up a broken transformer - they're trying to cover up the tiny black hole that formed in the transformers, and is growing exponentially.
The summary authors don't seem to understand. Nobody at CERN reported the malfunction? I assume they mean "reported to the press" -- otherwise, how did they fix a 30-ton transistor without telling anyone.
Anyway, things malfunction and break on particle accelerators constantly. They're devilishly difficult to maintain properly. (They operate in extreme fail-safe modes, so failures harmless but common.)
Well, most are. When I was working at the (then SERC) Daresbury Nuclear Structure Facility, we were basically sitting under a really big tank of SF6 (Sulpher Hexafluoride) which is not stuff you want to be breathing. It's not poisonous. It doesn't do much other than sit there and be really really inert, but that makes it a superb gas for accelerators. It also makes it hard to detect and really bad for oxygen-breathing lifeforms.
But, yes, things would go wrong all the time with that, and it was a child's toy compared to the LHC - in terms of power (Darebury's tandem accelerator was a puny 20 MeV), technology, scale, rarity/availability of skills, innovativeness, etc. Not only did things go wrong, but it routinely arced. If you thought a Van De Graaf generator or a Tesla Coil was impressive, you've never seen an accelerator when the insulating gas fails.
However, another thing to consider is the European attitude to emergencies. I got to see the operators of the facility during an SF6 leak. Those guys weren't casual by any means but they kept their cool better than most refrigerators. Working their way through the emergency drills methodically and and calmly. And that was a potentially life-threatening emergency. A mere transformer?! Pah. Bet the only ones who even flinched were the accountants. The main scientists weren't expecting to run experiments for a while yet, as it wasn't even considered as burned-in.
If the news channels thought this was significant, they've clearly never visited a laboratory after high-school and skipped classes there.
by Anonymous Coward
on Thursday September 18 2008, @09:02PM (#25065389)
a) Yes, it is a big complicated machine, things will break, this device barely impacted the overall schedule at all. People have been working on this project for about 2 decades. A week or two isn't in the least bit significant.
b) If this had happened say, 5 years from now, this point would be as irrelevant as it is now. And as noteworthy.
c) Cosmic rays interact in our atmosphere in the PeV range (Peta Electron Volt), the LHC smashes particles together in the 14 TeV (Tera Electron Volt). Sooo.... it operates at energy levels an order of magnitude less than what currently happens on Earth... I don't know about you, but I feel pretty safe about the whole thing.
d) They did fix it pronto, and it does work. Little things break, I know where I work (a not so little accelerator) I didn't hear a PEEP about this incident and we have been directly and closely involved in the LHC.
In short, I agree with hairykrishna, this isn't really news. Just another instance of the media trying to make a big deal out of something small.
Isn't this the controversial machine that may or may not destroy the planet itself?
Goddammit NO. It's the machine that will not destroy the planet, but some controversial people have done a damn good job of spreading rumors that it will. The point of the LHC is to re-create events that occur everywhere in the universe all the time, including here on earth. It's just not practical to put 50' diameter detectors hanging in the upper atmosphere and wait for a particle collision to happen inside of one.
I think the problem is that everyone who actually understands this big complicated machine also understands they break, especially when first built.
This are one of a kind structures. Everyone who matters in the project or in the community that really knows how it works and what it does has probably dealt with previous ones... which breaking or needing major changes early on isn't a shocker for them.
To the guys who are working on it, it was probably just a question of what broke, not if it broke. We're not talking about creating a piston engine, which we've been doing for a hundred years, we're talking about new technology custom built for the project for the most part. The transformer probably wasn't, but they break too. I have a coworker whos husband worked for a large power company, helping to install substations, it wasn't suprising to him that it broke, appearently for large scale transformers its still hit or miss when they first start being used.
If no one involved in the project is really 'shocked' that it broke, maybe it the thought that it should be a media frenzy never crossed their minds?
The LHC? Destroy the planet? Turn in your geek card. We may or may not let you go on digg, following a probationary period where you may only post comments on youtube.
I don't know how you do it. It never works for me.
I could've sworn I left my favorite rug on top of the black hole in the living room the other day but, crazy as it sounds, it seems to have just disappeared. I'd swear on a stack of bibles that's where I left the dang thing and you know it didn't just grow legs and walk out of the house.
It's a fairly standard measurement for mass, though. Transformers have mass, so it's perfectly applicable, especially when you are trying to underscore the massiveness of the piece of equipment in question, rather than its functional capability. If the person writing the article/summary wanted to underscore the cost of the unit, he might have measured it in US dollars. That's what journalists do: describe things in terms their readers might understand or care about. And most of their readers aren't pedantic electrical engineers.
What with, you know, most of the world's population thinking that day was the critical "black-hole" day.
Whilst I'm sure that is beneficial for CERN in the context that most people will be completely unaware on the day that full speed collisions are truly started, I do not for one moment think the media had that intention. A publicised failure would only serve to increase people's prejudice.
The transformer failure is just one of those things. But, according to the article..
After it was started up Sept. 10, scientists circled a beam of protons in a clockwise direction at the speed of light. They shut that down, then turned on a counterclockwise beam.
Now, accelerating a proton to the speed of light seems to me impossible, given that they are in a vacuum. But if they can do that, then the other interpretation is possible. It was the scientists who were circling at the speed of light, round say, a little beaker of protons. I'd like to commend whoever shut them down, then anti-beamed them to restore reality.
If you read TFA, you discover that it, but not the provided summary on/., says it was news to nobody in the field that something broke. What's not said here, but said in TFA and far more worthy of mention, is that they replaced it and were running again the next day, well before AP even inquired. Falling prey to the cheap journalistic gimmick of awfulism, are we?
For those who only read the "summary" (I use this term loosely) and aren't familiar with the LHC you may be surprised to learn that:
this is not a major failure
there is no sinister cover-up
no one was ever in any danger
Thanks for some more fear-mongering doomsday garbage "news" Slashdot. The purpose of editors, at least for non-tabloid news sources, is to filter factually inaccurate and inflammatory nonsense, not seek it out.
"A 30-ton transformer in the Large Hadron Collider malfunctioned, requiring complete replacement on the day the LHC came online."
This news must have traveled in time - because the LHC doesn't come online until sometime next summer. Right now, its in the middle stages of a months long startup and calibration sequence.
Not to mention that stuff breaks during the startup of complex machinery, doubly so for one of a kind complex machinery.
The maximum magnetic field you can put on a superconductor depends on temperature. You can operate a superconducting magnet with a stronger magnetic field at 2 Kelven instead of 4.5 kelvin. Also, below 2.17 degrees kelvin, helium becomes super-fluid and has better heat conductivity - this is important in some applications.
For alternating fields (like microwaves) superconductors are not perfectly superconducting, they have a bit if residual resistance. This resistance decreases as the temperature goes down.
Well, I haven't the faintest idea how the damn thing is cooled, but helium becomes superfliud at 2.17K (iirc). It effectively loses all of its viscosity and becomes far more thermally conductive. At 2K its a superfluid, at 4.5K its not. Cool stuff, but I don't know if it matters, I don't know squat about the LHC. (see what you get for asking a question on/.?)
Can one of you physicists tell me how 4.5
Kelvin is different from 2 Kelvin, operationally?
The magnets they use to shape and steer the beam require about 12,000 amps, so they use superconductors. Between 2K and 4.5K, the superconductor undergoes a phase change and becomes non-superconducting, and the resistance goes from zero to not zero all of a sudden. The 12,000 amps suddenly produces an incredible amount of heat (P=I^2R) which drastically increases the pressure from the liquid He. That much pressure means the He needs to escape (violently), causing all sorts of trouble. It's called a 'quench.'
The used superconductors are good well above 4K (although with decreased maximum saturation). The main point is that they want their helium to be superfluidic, as otherwise it would be impossible to direct the heat over the many km needed (if their were bubble formation in the dewars).
With superfluidic helium, heat resistance also drops nearly to zero(as we are in the real world, it cannot be zero. But heat conductivity increases by many magnitudes, and bubble formation is eliminated). That way, they can keep heat gradients along the whole ring well below 1K.
Transformers... (Score:5, Funny)
morethanmeetstheeye (Score:4, Funny)
You folks crack me up.
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Re:morethanmeetstheeye (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:morethanmeetstheeye (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:morethanmeetstheeye (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:morethanmeetstheeye (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean this as no insult to digg, but the comments on the articles (and most of the articles themselves) are absolute shit. Most of the people commenting are - by their own admission - highschoolers and young college kids. With Slashdot, at least there's some pretense of being accurate and factual in the comments - users who troll or make ill-informed posts are usually modded down or corrected by other users.
In summary, I submit to you a summary of the current digg RSS feed as evidence of article and community quality on digg -
The above is but a small sample of the typical digg feed. Oddly, there aren't any "Marijuana will cure everything and it's 'big pharma' keeping it illegal maaaaaan" articles in the feed, but I'm sure those will trickle in as the day goes on.
:-)
Seriously. Digg is fucking retarded. Hang out there for a week and tell me Slashdot has approached that level of stupidity or redundancy.
No offense to digg or the OP, BTW
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Re:Transformers... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Transformers... (Score:5, Informative)
They're going to use the LHC to make energon cubes.
There, fixed that for you. Also, turn in your geen badge.
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Re:Transformers... (Score:5, Insightful)
There, fixed that for you. Also, turn in your geek badge.
Fixed.
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Re:Transformers... (Score:5, Funny)
You know, that very well may be the first time I've seen on Slashdot, where "there, fixed that for you," actually fixed an actual issue. Bravo, sir.
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Re:Transformers... (Score:5, Funny)
There, fixed that for you. Also, turn in your geek badge.
Transformed.
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Re:Transformers... (Score:4, Funny)
There, fixed that for you. Also, turn in your geek badge.
There, fixed that for you. Also, turn in your English homework.
Parent
A Transformer? (Score:5, Funny)
I bet it was Omegatron!
Dead 30 ton transformer? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Dead 30 ton transformer? (Score:4, Funny)
If it's any help, I swept Optimus Prime under a rug in three hours. No biggie.
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GORDON! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:GORDON! (Score:5, Funny)
http://i35.tinypic.com/256fu4g.jpg [tinypic.com]
Parent
Why the tone in the summary? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a big, complicated machine - shit breaks. It gets fixed. I wouldn't worry about it unless you're waiting for beam time.
Re:Why the tone in the summary? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Link to current status page (Score:5, Informative)
The current status of the beam can always be viewed here [web.cern.ch]
All other status informations are linked from here [web.cern.ch]
So maybe they didn't make a press release, but perhaps journalists should be smart enough to find these pages instead of claiming conspiracies?
Parent
Re:Why the tone in the summary? (Score:5, Funny)
They're not trying to cover up a broken transformer - they're trying to cover up the tiny black hole that formed in the transformers, and is growing exponentially.
Parent
Re:Why the tone in the summary? (Score:4, Interesting)
The summary authors don't seem to understand. Nobody at CERN reported the malfunction? I assume they mean "reported to the press" -- otherwise, how did they fix a 30-ton transistor without telling anyone.
Anyway, things malfunction and break on particle accelerators constantly. They're devilishly difficult to maintain properly. (They operate in extreme fail-safe modes, so failures harmless but common.)
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Re:Why the tone in the summary? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Summary plainly misleading (Score:5, Informative)
They have day-to-day log of the activities at https://lhc-commissioning.web.cern.ch/lhc-commissioning/dailynews/index.htm [web.cern.ch] I didn't have any problems finding this logs at the LHC website.
Transformer outage and cryogenics breakdown is logged on September 13. They were not 'rumors'.
Parent
Re:Why the tone in the summary? (Score:5, Informative)
a) Yes, it is a big complicated machine, things will break, this device barely impacted the overall schedule at all. People have been working on this project for about 2 decades. A week or two isn't in the least bit significant.
b) If this had happened say, 5 years from now, this point would be as irrelevant as it is now. And as noteworthy.
c) Cosmic rays interact in our atmosphere in the PeV range (Peta Electron Volt), the LHC smashes particles together in the 14 TeV (Tera Electron Volt). Sooo.... it operates at energy levels an order of magnitude less than what currently happens on Earth... I don't know about you, but I feel pretty safe about the whole thing.
d) They did fix it pronto, and it does work. Little things break, I know where I work (a not so little accelerator) I didn't hear a PEEP about this incident and we have been directly and closely involved in the LHC.
In short, I agree with hairykrishna, this isn't really news. Just another instance of the media trying to make a big deal out of something small.
Parent
Re:Why the tone in the summary? (Score:5, Funny)
... trying to make a big deal out of something small.
I was just thinking that this is the most concise way of describing a particle physicist's job.
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Re:Why the tone in the summary? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yay, scientists have facts, but the rest of people will have questions.
Actually it's the other way round.
Parent
Re:Why the tone in the summary? (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't this the controversial machine that may or may not destroy the planet itself?
Goddammit NO. It's the machine that will not destroy the planet, but some controversial people have done a damn good job of spreading rumors that it will. The point of the LHC is to re-create events that occur everywhere in the universe all the time, including here on earth. It's just not practical to put 50' diameter detectors hanging in the upper atmosphere and wait for a particle collision to happen inside of one.
Parent
Re:Why the tone in the summary? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the problem is that everyone who actually understands this big complicated machine also understands they break, especially when first built.
This are one of a kind structures. Everyone who matters in the project or in the community that really knows how it works and what it does has probably dealt with previous ones ... which breaking or needing major changes early on isn't a shocker for them.
To the guys who are working on it, it was probably just a question of what broke, not if it broke. We're not talking about creating a piston engine, which we've been doing for a hundred years, we're talking about new technology custom built for the project for the most part. The transformer probably wasn't, but they break too. I have a coworker whos husband worked for a large power company, helping to install substations, it wasn't suprising to him that it broke, appearently for large scale transformers its still hit or miss when they first start being used.
If no one involved in the project is really 'shocked' that it broke, maybe it the thought that it should be a media frenzy never crossed their minds?
Parent
Re:Why the tone in the summary? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
sweep a 30-ton transformer breaking under the rug? (Score:5, Funny)
It would be hard to sweep a 30-ton transformer under a rug, unless there is a black hole under said rug.
Re:sweep a 30-ton transformer breaking under the r (Score:5, Funny)
True, but if they're real scientists they'd figure out it's easier to sweep the black hole under the 30-ton transformer. When done, cover up with rug.
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Re:sweep a 30-ton transformer breaking under the r (Score:5, Funny)
I don't know how you do it. It never works for me.
I could've sworn I left my favorite rug on top of the black hole in the living room the other day but, crazy as it sounds, it seems to have just disappeared. I'd swear on a stack of bibles that's where I left the dang thing and you know it didn't just grow legs and walk out of the house.
Parent
One transformer down... (Score:5, Funny)
several to go.
Well ALICE, let's see how deep the budget hole goes...
Reminder (Score:5, Funny)
Just in case anyone else misread the headline, there's a vas deferens between the Large Hadron Collider and the Large Hardon Collider.
Re:Reminder (Score:5, Funny)
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I have a degree in electrical engineering... (Score:4, Funny)
...and I didn't realize the standard measurement for transformers had been changed to tons. Must be a European measurement?
I think kVA or MVA would be a better statistic.
Re:I have a degree in electrical engineering... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a fairly standard measurement for mass, though. Transformers have mass, so it's perfectly applicable, especially when you are trying to underscore the massiveness of the piece of equipment in question, rather than its functional capability. If the person writing the article/summary wanted to underscore the cost of the unit, he might have measured it in US dollars. That's what journalists do: describe things in terms their readers might understand or care about. And most of their readers aren't pedantic electrical engineers.
Parent
I don't really think CERN owe the media any favors (Score:5, Insightful)
Whilst I'm sure that is beneficial for CERN in the context that most people will be completely unaware on the day that full speed collisions are truly started, I do not for one moment think the media had that intention. A publicised failure would only serve to increase people's prejudice.
Is the speed of light slower near Lyons (Score:5, Funny)
After it was started up Sept. 10, scientists circled a beam of protons in a clockwise direction at the speed of light. They shut that down, then turned on a counterclockwise beam.
Now, accelerating a proton to the speed of light seems to me impossible, given that they are in a vacuum. But if they can do that, then the other interpretation is possible. It was the scientists who were circling at the speed of light, round say, a little beaker of protons. I'd like to commend whoever shut them down, then anti-beamed them to restore reality.
Not News and News (Score:5, Insightful)
If you read TFA, you discover that it, but not the provided summary on /., says it was news to nobody in the field that something broke. What's not said here, but said in TFA and far more worthy of mention, is that they replaced it and were running again the next day, well before AP even inquired. Falling prey to the cheap journalistic gimmick of awfulism, are we?
Slashdot- your source for yellow (tech) journalism (Score:4, Insightful)
this is not a major failure
there is no sinister cover-up
no one was ever in any danger
Thanks for some more fear-mongering doomsday garbage "news" Slashdot. The purpose of editors, at least for non-tabloid news sources, is to filter factually inaccurate and inflammatory nonsense, not seek it out.
they deserve a break (Score:4, Funny)
Time travel (Score:5, Informative)
"A 30-ton transformer in the Large Hadron Collider malfunctioned, requiring complete replacement on the day the LHC came online."
This news must have traveled in time - because the LHC doesn't come online until sometime next summer. Right now, its in the middle stages of a months long startup and calibration sequence.
Not to mention that stuff breaks during the startup of complex machinery, doubly so for one of a kind complex machinery.
Re:Not the end of the world... (Score:5, Informative)
Can one of you physicists tell me how 4.5 Kelvin is different from 2 Kelvin, operationally?
At 2 K, adding a given amount of energy makes the entropy of the system go up 2.25 times as much as it would at 4.5 K. :)
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Re:Not the end of the world... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Not the end of the world... (Score:4, Funny)
Lipstick.
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Re:Not the end of the world... (Score:5, Informative)
Well, I haven't the faintest idea how the damn thing is cooled, but helium becomes superfliud at 2.17K (iirc). It effectively loses all of its viscosity and becomes far more thermally conductive. At 2K its a superfluid, at 4.5K its not. Cool stuff, but I don't know if it matters, I don't know squat about the LHC. (see what you get for asking a question on /.?)
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Re:Not the end of the world... (Score:5, Informative)
The magnets they use to shape and steer the beam require about 12,000 amps, so they use superconductors. Between 2K and 4.5K, the superconductor undergoes a phase change and becomes non-superconducting, and the resistance goes from zero to not zero all of a sudden. The 12,000 amps suddenly produces an incredible amount of heat (P=I^2R) which drastically increases the pressure from the liquid He. That much pressure means the He needs to escape (violently), causing all sorts of trouble. It's called a 'quench.'
Parent
Not Quite the point here (Score:5, Interesting)
The used superconductors are good well above 4K (although with decreased maximum saturation).
The main point is that they want their helium to be superfluidic, as otherwise it would be impossible to direct the heat over the many km needed (if their were bubble formation in the dewars).
With superfluidic helium, heat resistance also drops nearly to zero(as we are in the real world, it cannot be zero. But heat conductivity increases by many magnitudes, and bubble formation is eliminated). That way, they can keep heat gradients along the whole ring well below 1K.
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