The world’s largest particle accelerator now has an important new mission: heating thousands of homes. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN has begun to funnel the waste heat from its cooling system to a new residential and commercial area in the nearby French town of Ferney-Voltaire, with the new linkup expected to be able to heat several thousand homes at once.

    • jaybone@lemmy.zip
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      32 minutes ago

      Yeah like “the use of combustion engines will heat millions of French homes in the next ten years.”

    • ripcord@lemmy.world
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      2 hours ago

      It must be some sort of base pessimism thing. My automatic assumption was that it was benevolent and intentional.

      • Tarquinn2049@lemmy.world
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        1 hour ago

        It might be about general knowledge of how colliders work, the sentence structure does it no favours, but half way through I realised it had to be intentional/beneficial due to knowing the only possible way a collider generates heat as a byproduct.

        Where as someone that doesn’t know much about colliders might read that sentence and assume it’s like radiative heat or something.

        • dukemirage@lemmy.world
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          4 minutes ago

          It was just comical to imagine the collider would heat up the residents directly like an enormous microwave oven. In the usual wording, households are warmed, and indirectly the residents.

  • Janx@piefed.social
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    5 hours ago

    They say if you stand in the middle of the LHC, you’ll be warm for the rest of your life…

  • Remember_the_tooth@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    I know this is probably a mundane engineering thing, but it sounds like a ramp up to a Black Mirror episode. We just need some kind of social commentary. Maybe the waste energy secretly contain MacGuff-ons, a known chrono-hazard. Only the poorest people will use it, for lack of alternative?

  • FauxLiving@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    Wait until the people find out that the waste heat is contained in liquid hydrogen at 3 kelvin.

  • HelluvaKick@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    I’ve been playing Steins;Gate while snowed in and now super apprehensive about anything CERN related lol