Blimey... sounds dodgy to me..

Groucho



Joined: 26/04/2008
Posts: 7993

Message Posted:
20/09/2008 11:16

Plans to begin smashing particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) may be delayed after a magnet failure forced engineers to halt work.



The failure, known as a quench, caused around 100 of the LHC's super-cooled magnets to heat up by as much as 100C.



The fire brigade were called out after a tonne of liquid helium leaked into the tunnel at Cern, near Geneva.



The LHC beam will remain turned off over the weekend while engineers investigate the severity of the fault.



A spokesman for Cern told the BBC it was not yet clear how soon progress could resume at the £3.6bn ($6.6bn) particle accelerator.



While the failure was "not good news", he said glitches of this kind were not unexpected during testing.