CERN's LHC To Shut Down For Repair & Upgrades 97
hypnosec writes "CERN has revealed that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is going into hibernation and will be shut down for a period of two years for upgrades. The LHC will go through a maintenance and upgrade phase starting in March that will bring the atom smasher up to speed with its maximum energy levels. From the article: 'The machine that last year helped scientists snare the elusive Higgs boson – or a convincing subatomic impostor – faces a two-year shutdown while engineers perform repairs that are needed for the collider to ramp up to its maximum energy in 2015 and beyond. The work will beef up electrical connections in the machine that were identified as weak spots after an incident four years ago that knocked the collider out for more than a year.'"
"revealed" (Score:5, Insightful)
For how many years needs something to be known before it is no longer a revelation? Seriously, this schedule has been in the plans for several years, it was also clear from even before the initial start that before going to design luminosity (i.e. beam intensity in layman's speak) and design energy a shutdown for refurbishment would be necessary. This is no surprise at all -- after all running the world's highest energy particle collider (the LHC at 7 TeV) would necessarily teach us something about running a machine at even higher energies (the LHC which will run at 13-14 TeV starting 2014) that we didn't know before.
Re:They should have made the tunnel bigger (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately the way projects are funded, there is strong pressure to minimize the initial cost, even if the total cost in the long run will be higher. "operating" costs can usually be taken into account, but most funding agencies are very reluctant to spend more money not for future non-approved upgrades.