  Heavy ion cross sections totaling several hundred barns have been calculated
previously for the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the Large Hadron
Collider (LHC). These total cross sections are more than an order of magnitude
larger than the geometric ion-ion cross sections primarily due to Bound-Free
Pair Production (BFPP) and Electro-Magnetic Dissociation (EMD). Apart from a
general interest in verifying the calculations experimentally, an accurate
prediction of the losses created in the heavy ion collisions is of practical
interest for the LHC, where some collision products are lost in cryogenically
cooled magnets and have the potential to quench these magnets. In the 2012 RHIC
run uranium ions collided with each other at $\sqrt{s_{NN}} = 192.8$ GeV with
nearly all beam losses due to collisions. This allows for the measurement of
the total cross section, which agrees with the calculated cross section within
the experimental error.
