Procrastination has put experts at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in a rather precarious position: they need to upgrade the massive particle accelerator called the Large Hadron Collider, but to do so, they will first have to remove thousands of obsolete cables.
According to Motherboard and The Verge, CERN engineers had previously decided to put off removing obsolete cables while improving the collider, and the number has soared to more than 9,000. Now, they need to upgrade the machine again, but they’re running out of room, meaning that all of those old cables now need to be carefully removed.
Reports suggest that this will be no easy task, even for some of the planet’s most knowledgeable boffins . The cables need to be identified and manually disconnected before replacements can be installed, as they are blocking the way. Of course, with a machine as complex as the LHC, there is always the risk that someone could make a mistake, with potentially disastrous results.
“Telling apart functioning and out-of-use cables in one of the world’s biggest and most expensive experiments is a high-stakes game,” Motherboard explained. “Pull out the wrong cable, and at best you might have lost some data monitoring capabilities. Worst case scenario, you might yank out a crucial safety cable and the accelerator simply won’t work.”
“That’s why it’s so tricky to complete this operation – because any mistake could start major trouble at the restart of the accelerator,” Sébastien Evrard, the engineer in charge of the cord-removal project, told the website. “Of course, in an ideal world we would remove the old and obsolete cables before installing new ones, but this was not the case.”
Project will take four year to complete
The clean-up is in preparation for CERN’s LHC Injectors Upgrade Project, which is scheduled to take place in 2019. Three injectors, each of which play a role in accelerating particles into beams before they enter the collider, each have roughly 3,000 unused cables that need removed.
A team of 60 mechanical engineers, led by Evrard, has already started identifying the cable with the help of a database, and will begin disconnecting them at the end of the year when the collider is temporarily shut down. However, the process with take four years to fully complete.
Evrard told Motherboard that the team started disconnecting cables in one of the injectors, the Proton Synchrotron Booster (PS Booster), in December and have already removed an estimated 2,700 thus far. Each of the cables is said to be 50 meters long, and the website explained that the process is “painstaking.” Evrard himself joked that the work was “not sexy” and said that it had been difficult to motivate personnel to complete the necessary tasks.
Compounding things is the fact that the database being used by the engineers is “not 100 percent reliable,” Evrard said, meaning that his team needs to “go onsite and check the correct location of all these expected obsolete cables to see if they are really obsolete or still in use. From the experience we’ve got in the past few weeks, we can say that about two percent of the cables that were expected to be obsolete are in fact still in use.”
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Feature Image: CERN
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