Safety aspects for the design and operation of new accelerator facilities 1
a) During the acceleration cycle in the synchrotron, a small fraction of the partially stripped ions will loose electrons due to interaction with the rest gas. These ions leave the orbit and hit the beam tubes, thus inducing radiation. The vacuum specifications for SIS100/200 are such that these beam losses are tolerable. The radiation has also to be kept to a low level in order to avoid the quenching of the superconducting magnets. Nevertheless, the required shielding is quite substantial what made the choice of an underground installation for the SIS100/200, also motivated by ecological considerations, rather obvious.
RADIATION PROBLEMS IN THE DESIGN OF THE LARGE ELECTRON - POSITRON COLLIDER (LEP)
This is a comprehensive review of the radiation problems taken into account in the design studies for the Large Electron-Positron collider (LEP) now under construction at CERN. It provides estimates and calculations of the magnitude of the most important hazards, including those from non-ionizing radiations and magnetic fields as well as from ionizing radiation, and describes the measures to be taken in the design, construction, and operation to limit them. Damage to components is considered as well as the risk to people. More general explanations are given of the physical processes and technical parameters that influence the production and effects of radiation, and a comprehensive bibliography provides access to the basic theories and other discussions of the subject. The report effectively summarizes the findings of the Working Group on LEP radiation problems and parallels the results of analogous studies made for the previous large accelerator. The concluding chapters describe the LEP radiation protection system, which is foreseen to reduce doses far below the legal limits for all those working with the machine or living nearby, and summarize the environmental impact. Costs are also briefly considered.
Pedagogy of the “Not”: Negation, Exodus, and Postdigital Temporal Regimes
Postdigital capitalist time is an incessant acceleration that acts to homogenize time and wed us to the present, to which we have to constantly catch up. While the impulse of this is no doubt economic (the realization of value), it is crucially undergirded by a pedagogical logic wherein we have to perpetually learn and re-learn the latest apps, social media configurations, operating systems, and so on. Political strategies of resistance thus need to be bolstered by an alternative mode of educational life, and I propose a pedagogy of the “not” as one possibility. Such a pedagogy is an act of suspension that sustains a detachment from the present, clearing out oppositions and thereby exposing us to a radical indeterminacy and potentiality that is always untimely. Suspension is the praxis of negation, which means that negation operates by keeping sense indeterminate to meaning and signification. Rather than suppressing, disavowing, or annihilating the stated content, negation retains even that which is negated. While this would appear as a form of exopedagogy, which withdraws from the dialectic of the private/public, I instead argue that it redefines the terms of any dialectic, redefining the very categories exopedagogy withdraws from. Before concluding, I spend some time with Sandy Grande’s important critiques of Eurocentrism and progress in Western critical education, demonstrating how negation as suspension circumvents these errors through its accommodation of—or, better, insistence on—variegated temporalities and forms of life.