The world’s largest particle accelerator now has an important new mission: heating thousands of homes. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN has begun to funnel the waste heat from its cooling system to a new residential and commercial area in the nearby French town of Ferney-Voltaire, with the new linkup expected to be able to heat several thousand homes at once.


This thing has been running for over 15 years and they just figured out they could use the waste heat?
It’s not really the same thing today as it was 15 years ago. It also hasn’t been running continuously that whole time. They regularly stop experimenting to build new extensions onto it.
I visited the LHC back in 2019 and at the time they were expanding it even then.
I doubt you can answer but did it just become economically viable?
I’d bet it was viable earlier and someone just figured this out.
Makes me wonder recycling the heat from AI data centers.
Better late than never