Prophets of Doom Sue Over Atom-Smasher's Safety

In a doomsday scenario straight out of science fiction, two Hawaii residents have filed suit to block the operation of a giant particle accelerator that they believe could create an Earth-eating “mini-black hole.”

Physicists are planning to switch on the Large Hadron Collider this year after spending 14 years and $8 billion building it in an underground tunnel nearly 17 miles long at a Swiss laboratory. The world's largest particle accelerator is designed to collide high-energy beams of protons into each other at a force equal to a 400-ton train traveling at 120 mph.

The experiment will supposedly help physicists solve, as MSNBC put it, “some of the deepest questions in science.” But in their suit filed in Hawaii federal court, former nuclear safety officer Walter Wagner and co-plaintiff Luis Sancho warn that the Center for Nuclear Energy Research lab and its collaborators could unleash a cosmic cataclysm.

Under one theory, the complaint says, there would be “an irreversible implosion, forming a miniature version of a giant black hole” that would eventually grow so large that all of Earth would fall into it. Alternatively, the planet would be converted into a single huge lump of “strange matter” known as a “strangelet.”

The plaintiffs aren't asking the court to save the world -– which, believe it or not, is beyond the powers of even a federal judge. But they are seeking to enjoin the collider's creators from operating it “until such time as the LHC can be proven to be reasonably safe within industry standards.”

Most commentators are predicting the case will quickly fall into a judicial black hole. A New York judge in 2000 dismissed a suit Wagner filed against the operators of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Brookhaven, N.Y, which depicted a similar doomsday scenario.

Wagner failed to show either "that [his complaint] is likely to succeed on the merits, or ... that there are sufficiently serious questions going to the merits to make them a fair ground for litigation," Judge John Gleeson ruled.

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The U.S. government filed a summary judgment motion June 24, 2008, arguing 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."

U.S. District Judge Helen Gillmor granted the summary judgment motion Sept. 26, 2008, finding she had no jurisdiction to hear the case under the National Environmental Policy Act. Wagner and Sancho have appealed.