SKIRMISHER

You may have to wait a coupla years till the world ends properly in 2010 as the Large Hadron Collider’s repairs, initially thought to last only two months, will actually take that said time to be complete.

Coming online in September, the LHC blew a transformer that controlled its cooling in preliminary test firings.  Without the cooling, the LHC could not operate.  It was later found that a single bad solder was to blame for the failure, which not only blew out the transformer, but melted much of the attached circuitry.

Initially, the $21M USD repairs were expected to take a couple months at most.  This deadline was quickly pushed back in statements by CERN director Robert Aymar to April 2009 and then finally to the summer (June 2009).  Now the expected completion date for repairs has slid yet again.

CERN spokesman James Gillies, surely beleaguered by having to bear all the bad news of late, broke the latest development on Friday.  He describes the new restart target date as “the late summer of 2009″.

He described two plans for the LHC — “Plan A” and “Plan B”.  “Plan A” involves bringing the accelerator online in the late summer 2009, with lower power firings.  This plan would attempt to restore operation as early as possible, but at the cost of full functionality.  If you think “Plan A” sounds unattractive, try “Plan B”; “Plan B” would put the LHC out of commission until 2010 at the earliest.

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