What Is The Carbon Footprint Of The Large Hadron Collider?

Posted on 30. Nov, 2009 by Ross in Climate Change, Europe

The Large Hadron Collider is the highest profile science experiment on the planet, promising scientists insights into the creation of the universe and the nature of matter. It is a circular tunnel 27km (17 miles) in circumference running under the surface of France and Switzerland through which particle beams circle at almost the speed of light before smashing into one another inside massive detectors.

The particle beams in the Large Hadron Collider circle between magnets in near-perfect vacuums, cooled to just 1.9K by 96 tonnes of liquid helium. All this is in aid of the search for the elusive Higgs Boson, as well as investigating quark–gluon plasma which existed within the early embryonic universe.

But at a time of universal concern over climate change, should a project which consumes vast quantities of energy be at the top of the scientific agenda? Just what is the carbon footprint of the Large Hadron Collider?

According to the Large Hadron Collider’s own website, the energy demands of the site will peak at 180MW when fully operational. Of this total, the energy required to cool the Large Hadron Collider will sum to around 27.5MW, whilst the experiment’s energy itself will total 22MW. The larger CERN site also adds to the base carbon footprint, as does the associated data storage computing grid and other scientific resources.

During winter months when the experiment is not in use, the Large Hadron Collider with still require 35MW to keep alive. Winter shut-downs are scheduled after this winter in order to reduce costs: the price of energy in the summer is lower than during the winter months, even though the energy required for cooling might be slightly reduced.

Despite only restarted full experiments on 20th November 2009 after initial problems in 2008, CERN estimate that the Large Hadron Collider will have used 700GWh by the end of 2009. CERN has nopower station on site except for a couple of back-up generators, so the carbon footprint must be calculated from the constituent countries’ national grids.

Most of that energy comes from France, where 80% of energy on the national grid is generated by nuclear power stations (Switzerland’s energy mix is similarly low-carbon). This means that a megawatt hour of electrical energy used by the Large Hadron Collider produces only 88kg of carbon dioxide - just a fifth of the carbon footprint that the project would incur in the UK and a seventh of the carbon footprint it would have in the USA.

This still means, however, that the project will have been responsible for releasing 616,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide into the world’s atmosphere in 2009 in the pursuit of science extremely unlikely to yield any solutions to climate change this century.

That carbon footprint is also from a year in which the Large Hadron Collider saw very little activity. Experiments in 2010 are expected to ramp up the beam energy further, and upgrades over the winter of 2010 will see further increases in beam energy after that.

Fortunately, the Large Hadron Collider is scheduled to run for no more than another couple of years, by which time it is hoped that the experiment should have gathered enough data to unambiguously prove the existence of the Higgs Boson. After that, however, there are plans to upgrade the experiment further in order to probe other particle phenomena.

Most physicists would argue that the scientific rewards from the Large Hadron Collider are invaluable, but in an age when many scientists worry as much over climate change as their own fields of expertise, the massive carbon footprint of such experiments will likely cause some uneasy debate amongst research councils and private funders.

Is the Large Hadron Collider experiment justifiable on environmental grounds? Why not share your thoughts below!

Image by avlxyz @ Flickr

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Tags: carbon footprint, CERN, large hadron collider

3 Comments

Sonny

01. Dec, 2009

When compared to the other investments and expeditures and polluting endeavors of society, CERN is but a blip in the ocean, yet the possibilities for the returns are limitless.

The work achieved at the LHC has already given back so much (including the World Wide Web and it’s next incarnation, the Grid, is on its way), no one can predict what may develop in the future, which may well be of huge significance for the understanding of harnessing clean energy.

If there’s one thing worth spending our time and efforts and focus on, it’s the work that they’re doing at CERN. At this point in the game, you don’t start closing one of the few doors remaining left to walk through that might take us towards a better future. And this is the one with the great odds.