Large Hadron Collider Keeps Homes Warm With New Heat Exchange System
- The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in France now heats homes in the Ferney-Voltaire area by routing water from its cooling system through heat exchangers, repurposing otherwise wasted thermal energy.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) can now chalk up one more use, alongside discovering the Higgs boson and other subatomic particles: heating French homes. With the new thermal recycling system installed, the LHC will now route water from its cooling system through two 5MW heat exchangers, pushing otherwise redundant thermal energy into thousands of homes in the Ferney-Voltaire area.
The LHC is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator, residing in a 17-mile circular tunnel under the France–Switzerland border near Geneva. It began operation in 2009 and has been credited with some of the most pivotal particle physics discoveries of the past few decades. It also requires monumental cooling for the superconducting electromagnets, and those cryogenic systems again need to be cooled with water.
Traditionally, when that water was heated, it was transferred to coolant towers, but now it is routed into the new heat-exchange systems at LHC's Point 8, where the collider facility reaches the surface (rather than being dozens of meters underground). With a nearby town featuring a new residential and commercial district, it made sense to make use of this otherwise wasted energy.
Credit: CERN
Unfortunately, this won't last terribly long. The LHC is scheduled to enter lengthy maintenance after July 2026, after which it won't return online until at least June 2030. This is to give time for major upgrades to be completed, enabling the next generation of LHC testing.
"The third Long Shutdown (LS3) marks a critical milestone for CERN, enabling installation and commissioning of the High-Luminosity LHC equipment for the accelerator and the phase II upgrades of the ATLAS and CMS experiments," CERN said in a statement.
Fortunately, even during the several years of downtime, components of Point 8 will continue to operate and require cooling. That excess heat will still be used to help power nearby homes. CERN also has plans to expand this recycling to a second part of the collider, Point 1.
