Suit to Halt Big Collider in Europe Is Dismissed

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: GLIGOR1 () aol com
Date: September 30, 2008 3:54:42 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Subject: For IP: Suit to Halt Big Collider in Europe Is Dismissed




September 30, 2008
Suit to Halt Big Collider in Europe Is Dismissed

By DENNIS OVERBYE
A federal judge in Honolulu has dismissed a lawsuit trying to stop the  
running of a giant particle accelerator outside Geneva, dodging the  
issue of whether it could actually cause the end of the world.

The judge, Helen Gillmor, said in her ruling Friday that the court  
lacked jurisdiction over the Large Hadron Collider, which is located  
on the Swiss-French border and was built by CERN, the European  
Organization for Nuclear Research, with help from the United States  
and dozens of other countries.

When it is operating at full steam, the collider, which started  
circulating protons earlier this month before a series of mishaps shut  
it down for the winter, will accelerate protons to energies of seven  
trillion electron volts and slam them together in search of particles  
and forces not seen since the early moments of the Big Bang.

Last spring, Walter Wagner, a retired radiation safety officer who  
lives in Hawaii, and Luis Sancho, a science writer and professor in  
Barcelona, filed the lawsuit, claiming that the collider could produce  
a black hole that could eat the Earth or cause some other calamitous  
effect. Predictions of such outcomes have been refuted in safety  
studies.

This summer, for example, a report by a panel of physicists appointed  
by CERN concluded that the collider would not produce anything that  
billions of years of high-energy cosmic collisions had not produced.

Mr. Wagner and Mr. Sancho sued CERN, the United States Department of  
Energy, the National Science Foundation and the Fermi National  
Accelerator Laboratory in Federal District Court in Hawaii. The Energy  
Department and the science foundation have contributed about $531  
million of the collider’s estimated cost of $8 billion.

Judge Gillmor decided that the fraction paid by the United States was  
too small for the collider to constitute a “major federal action,” as  
defined by the National Environmental Policy Act, and so the court  
lacked jurisdiction on environmental grounds.

In an e-mail message, Mr. Sancho said, “The lawsuit was an  
unbelievable success in that it put the collider issue on the  
intellectual agenda.” Mr. Sancho also said that the most recent and  
thorough safety report would not have been done without their  
pressure. “The study was not perfect, but at least the safety factors  
on which CERN is relying are not quite as bad,” he said.

Judge Gillmor said the claim of planetary apocalypse was “a complex  
debate” of concern to more than just physicists. Noting that Congress  
had approved the money for the collider, she suggested that arguments  
about its effects would be more appropriately aired in a political  
arena than in a judicial one.

“Neither the language nor the history of NEPA,” she wrote, referring  
to the National Environmental Policy Act, “suggest that it was  
intended to give citizens a general opportunity to air their policy  
objections to proposed federal actions.”




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