Even Nuclear Detectors Need a Day Job!

Particle accelerators (like the famous Large Hadron Collider that found the even more famous Higgs particle a couple of years back) are ridiculously expensive. The Large Hadron Collider cost a jaw-dropping $9 billion (no, that’s not a typo)! How does anyone justify spending such huge amounts to learn more and more about even more obscure topics of physics that (let’s face it) most people neither understand nor care about? After all, what are the odds of ever discovering a new principle due to these detectors that would have any commercial application that would recover the money spent?

Kate Scholberg, a scientist, has a partial answer. Talking of detectors built to check out particles emitted by a supernova (that’s when a star blows up, literally):

“Your detector has to have a day job while it awaits a supernova.”

In other words, do something besides what it was built for.

Far removed from aims like understanding the universe, we have detectors to check far more earthly concerns. Like whether a nuclear test was conducted by countries that aren’t “allowed” to do so, like North Korea. You’d think these detectors have an obvious purpose that serves the interest of the existing nuclear nations. Strangely, that’s not reason enough to justify the money spent on them. Why? Sarah Zhang explains:

“The CTBTO is in an odd position these days. It exists to detect and thus deter tests of new nuclear weapons, but its eponymous treaty hasn’t been ratified by key nuclear powers like, well, the United States (that’s why it’s a Preparatory Commission). India hasn’t signed it. Pakistan hasn’t signed it. And, obviously, neither has North Korea. Absent power to enforce the treaty, the commission has to prove its worth in other ways.”

So if detecting nuclear tests is not reason enough to justify the money spent on them, what is their “day job”? Well, apart from collecting radiation data (obviously), these detectors also collect less obvious signs of a nuclear test: seismic, infrasound and hydroacoustic data. To justify their existence, their idea was to start sharing all that data (16 GB of data per day) with researchers in fields ranging from seismology to whale biology! The problem with such a policy?

“That openness is unusual in the world of nuclear policy.”

All that changed with the 2004 monster tsunami that hit Asian nations very hard. And, more relevant to this blog, took the world by surprise. Suddenly, the benefit of sharing seismic data to have an early warning system for tsunamis became a no-brainer.

As this example just showed, sharing data from detectors that seem to serve no “purpose” could still provide a benefit in some seemingly unrelated field. And that is why we build these insanely expensive detectors.