From a BBC article headed Fusion falters under soaring costs:
Covering an area of more than 400,000 square metres, workers have built a one-kilometre-long earthen platform on which the experimental reactor will sit. "This is going to be the world's biggest science experiment," says Neil Calder, Iter's head of communications.
Er ... wouldn't that be the Large Hadron Collider?
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9 comments:
Only if the LHC ever works.
D, surely it's still an experiment, whether it 'works' or not?
No. It's for a device called "Iter", which is a tokamak-based (somewhat) continuous fusion experiment. It's completely different from the LHC, and in a different location. Nothing to do with CERN as far as I'm aware.
I don't mean "work" in the sense of "yield results that support a hypothesis", I mean "work" in the sense of "avoid being a heap of junk that doesn't function".
Pogo. what I meant was "Isn't the LHC the biggest experiment?", of course it's a completely different thing.
D, even an experiment that doesn't "work" teaches people stuff they didn't realise at the onset.
Mark... Sorry, I see what you mean now - must be senility setting in!
OTOH, you could reasonably say that Iter is a bigger "experiment" than the LHC - which is just a bigger, better, faster version of well-proven "cyclotron" technology. I don't think there's any doubt that it will work once they've got the assorted "snags" fixed. Whereas I believe that there's considerable doubt as to whether Iter will manage to achieve ignition - and if it does, whether the containment system will manage to stop the bloody thing melting! :-)
Rather nice to have a discussion that doesn't involve Gordon Brown too.
Pogo:
LHC isn't a cyclotron - it's a synchrotron. A cyclotron is a low-energy machine with fixed magnetic bend field and fixed-frequency accelerating RF, but can produce an essentially continuous beam of particles. As they accelerate, particles spiral towards the outside of the machine.
A synchrotron sends particles on a fixed trajectory, increasing the magnetic bend field and the accelerating RF frequency as the particles accelerate.
The biggest cyclotron out there is at TRIUMF in Canada, and produces proton beams with an energy less than 0.01% of those in the LHC.
Sam, you know that and I know that... But I reckoned that as this isn't a science blog and "cyclotron" is a name more likely to be recognised, in keeping with education edict no 2001/101 I "dumbed it down a bit" (putting the name in inverted commas as a mea culpa to the scientifically-literate). :-)
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