Doomsday came last week for the “doomsday” lawsuit filed by two critics of a giant particle accelerator at a Swiss laboratory as a Hawaii judge said she has no jurisdiction over the case.

Former nuclear safety officer Walter Wagner and co-plaintiff Luis Sancho sought a permanent injunction on the operation of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), arguing that the U.S. government violated federal law by not reviewing its environmental impact.

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requires federal agencies to prepare a detailed study of the impact of all “major Federal actions significantly affecting the quality of the human environment.” According to Wagner and Sancho, the LHC could have a significant effect -– namely, the creation of an Earth-eating “mini-black hole.”

But without addressing the cosmic implications, U.S. District Judge Helen Gillmor summarily dismissed the case for lack of jurisdiction under NEPA, finding the $531 million contributed by Congress to the project's total construction cost of $5.84 billion was “minimal relative to 'the entire program.'”

“The applicable caselaw indicates that the funding provided by the United States for the construction of the Large Hadron Collider does not constitute a 'major Federal action' as defined by the National Environmental Policy Act,” she concluded in a Sept. 26 opinion.

The government had argued in its summary judgment motion that “Plaintiffs’ allegations regarding purely hypothetical occurrences that they claim pose a safety risk at the LHC are not accepted by the scientific community, are not based on rigorous scientific analysis, and are unfounded.”

Gillmor was a little more respectful, noting that the case “reflects disagreement among scientists about the possible ramifications of the operation of the Large Hadron Collider ... But Congress did not enact NEPA for the purpose of allowing this debate to proceed in federal court.”

She also disagreed with the plaintiffs that the U.S. Department of Energy engaged in a “partnership agreement” with the Geneva-based Center for Nuclear Energy Research (CERN) to build the collider. “According to the evidence before the Court, the United States has minimal control over the LHC project,” she said.

After nearly 14 years of construction, scientists at the CERN laboratory started the collider up at low energy earlier this month, sending beams of protons through an underground tunnel nearly 17 miles long. But last week, CERN announced that it would be shut down until next spring, in part because of technical problems.

By Matthew Heller
9/28/08