According to the Wall Street Journal, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, better known by its French acronym CERN, is currently drafting its next steps to shut down its particle accelerators, including the Large Hadron Collider, which has returned to load a few months ago in its third cycle, in response to the high energy demands in the European market.
“Our concern is really grid stability,” CERN energy panel chairman Serge Claudet told the WSJ, “because we do everything we can to prevent a blackout in our region.”
The energy crisis also affects research
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) had been inactive for four years . The pandemic and the tasks of updating, revisions, tests and improvements had caused this pause in its now great scientific infrastructure that woke up in July 2022, a decade after finding the Higgs boson.
Located near Geneva, next to the border between France and Switzerland, the LHC is a gigantic underground ring 27 kilometers in circumference at a depth of 100 metres. Now, despite the fact that the accelerator proudly showed its operation of 13.6 TeV of energy, with 6.8 TeV per proton beam and with new expectations about the Higgs boson saga, the search for dark matter and many other questions that await an answer (and from which new questions will arise), the experiments would have an obligatory pause.
Although a partial but imminent shutdown is possible, the organization is figuring out how it might idle the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) without shutting it down completely.
This announcement follows the announcement by Russia’s Gazprom energy service that it would indefinitely cut off natural gas supply through the Nord Stream pipeline, which is the main route for Russia to export natural gas to Europe.
CERN is not the only one planning a possible energy rationing , all of Europe is preparing for it, but the intention of the Swiss-based organization is to try to avoid a sudden and large-scale closure of the LHC.
Referencia: The Wall Street Journal wsj.com/articles/europes-energy-crunch-squeezes-worlds-largest-particle-collider-11662294416 / CERN
