NEI Nuclear Notes

This isn't directly related to nuclear power but I'm sure many of the readers here could appreciate the significance and relevance of this event.  From the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) : The first beam in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN was successfully steered around the full 27 kilometres [17 miles] of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator at 10h28 this morning. This historic event marks a key moment in the transition from over two decades of preparation to a new era of scientific discovery. ... Starting up a major new particle accelerator takes much more than flipping a switch. Thousands of individual elements have to work in harmony, timings have to be synchronized to under a billionth of a second, and beams finer than a human hair have to be brought into head-on collision. Today’s success puts a tick next to the first of those steps, and over the next few weeks, as the LHC’s operators gain experience and confidence with the new machine, the ...