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 new network is one of several initiatives that CERN is introducing to help it move towards more “environmentally responsible” research and to help reduce CO2 emissions. The LHC, the jewel in CERN’s crown, is otherwise better known for its large-scale research around the building blocks of the universe, including the discovery of the Higgs boson particle in 2012.
