Things are going well in all the Laboratory’s accelerators. For the SMACC project at the LHC (see here), work on the machine’s outer W bellows is well advanced with over half now opened up. To date we have completed 15% of the project and all the magnet and superconducting circuit consolidation activities are now being submitted to a quality audit by external experts from laboratories all over the world. 

Magnets are being replaced according to the schedule and the last of them should be in place before mid-August. The Radiation to Electronics (R2E) project to relocate the electronics is progressing particularly well and is one week ahead of schedule. At Point 7, the civil-engineering work to widen one of the access galleries is almost complete. At Point 5, drilling to allow the passage of the last of the 14 m-long sleeves, 40 cm in diameter, has been successfully completed.

Unfortunately there is some delay on one of the new magnets currently being built in Russia for the Antiproton Decelerator (AD) as the teams have encountered some problems with the manufacture of the coil.  However, it should be possible to absorb this delay within the schedule without too much difficulty.

The first new ventilation unit has been installed at the PS. At LEIR, the cabling campaign has begun, while at the SPS, work has started on the preparatory phase for replacement of the irradiated cables at Access Point 1. This operation is complicated by the ageing infrastructure, but, despite these difficulties, the first beam absorber has been extracted without a hitch.

More generally, the maintenance work on CERN’s 400 kV and 66 kV substations being performed by the Electrical Service is progressing well and should be completed by the end of July. Consolidation of the demineralised water supply systems is almost complete; it should be possible to restart production at the beginning of August. Finally, it should be noted that RTE (France’s electricity transmission system operator) has requested an additional week to complete maintenance of the protection relays - the equipment responsible for shutting off the power to a section of faulty network whenever necessary - which should be operational at the beginning of August.

Safety and litter: A message for us all

Safety is the first LS1 watchword. Those in charge of ensuring that LS1 runs smoothly therefore wish to remind you that everybody has a responsibility for safety and that no infringement or circumvention of the regulations will be tolerated.

Alongside safety issues, mention should also be made of the need to make sure that the tunnels are kept clean: we would particularly like to draw your attention to the fact that the drainage channels are not dustbins and that cleaning them is very costly in terms of human and financial resources.