Large Hadron Collider Starts Heating Local Homes Sustainably

One of the most expensive scientific experiments in history proved the existence of the Higgs boson and helped redefine our concept of physical reality, but is now being put to a more mundane use.

Line outlining the underground path of the LHC | CERN

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a collaborative endeavour supported by over 100 countries, was completed in 2008. It's a circular particle collider over 16 miles in circumference, lying 175m (574ft) beneath the Swiss-France border near Geneva. It was developed to help physicists explore both recognised and uncharted theories in particle physics. Its greatest achievement was the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle in 2012.

The LHC it is the largest particle accelerator ever built and designed to smash together subatomic particles at fantastic velocities - and that requires a lot of power, generating lots of waste heat. Until now, this heat was released into the atmosphere through evaporation cooling towers, but CERN's new endeavour is to put this waste heat to some good use - whilst also improving the LHC's environmental footprint.

In partnership with the local authorities, the heat from the accelerator is now collected and redirected into a district heating system, which provides heat to several thousand domestic residences and commercial properties in the surrounding area. The system was inaugurated last December and is now becoming fully operational.

Last year, scientists at CERN announced that the LHC needed to be upgraded in order to be able to extend fundamental physics research beyond its current capabilities - and have proposed the construction of the Future Hadron Collider (FCC), which would be more than three times the size of the LHC. They say that it would enable the study of dark matter components and physics at energy scales previously unattainable by human-made experiments.