Elon Musk has been in communication with the director of CERN about the construction of a tunnel for the proposed super collider under discussion at the Geneva-based organisation.
© Joe Duffy | Dreamstime.com
Elon Musk’s Boring Company has been busy boring a hole under Los Angeles, making him a logical person to contact if you have plans to dig a 100 km ringed tunnel like the one being considered by CERN.
In a recent Tweet, Musk said he’d been contacted by the director of CERN. CERN confirmed that the two had met.
Director of CERN asked me about Boring Co building the new LHC tunnel when we were at the @royalsociety. Would probably save several billon Euros.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 21, 2019
If you’re interested in Musk’s Boring Company, American blogger Casey Neistat offers a good rundown of it in the video below.
The future CERN collider would be an underground ring 100 km long, far longer than the 27 km existing ring. The new collider’s power would be ten times the existing one.
In Los Angeles a subway tunnel typically costs around US$ 900 million per mile. Musk said his 1.2 mile test tunnel cost US$ 10 million. One of his cost-saving tricks is to turn the excavated dirt into bricks on site and sell them. This turns a haulage cost into a revenue stream.
5 billion of the 9 billion euro expected cost of the proposed new collider tunnel would be consumed by construction work. Musk seems to think he can cut a few billion off that.
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