CERN LHC Lawsuit to be Dismissed?

According to this report from the New York Times, the Federal Government is moving to dismiss the lawsuit attempting to stop the activation of the CERN Large Haldron Collider in France. A large portion of the motion to dismiss seems to be coming from legal maneuvering as opposed to an argument on the merits of the case.

Calling its claims “overly speculative and not credible,” and saying that it is too late anyway, lawyers for the federal government argued this week that a so-called “doomsday suit” intended to prevent the startup of a the world’s most powerful particle accelerator should be thrown out of court.

In a barrage of some 40 documents filed the this week, government lawyers argued that the case should be dismissed and that they were entitled to a summary judgement in their favor because the lawsuit is subject to a six-year statute of limitations. The clock started ticking in this regard in 1998 or 1999 when the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy began spending money on the collider, the government lawyers say.

The government is basing their decision to seek dismissal on a number of fronts. First, they still claim that the CERN safety study sufficiently answered the safety questions raised, and that similar concerns were raised in a previous suit brought against the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) built at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, which was also dismissed. Second, they state that the suit would have no effect even if it were successful. The funding provided by the United States has already been spent, and if U.S. participation were ended today, the project would still go forward. A court in Hawaii has no authority to stop the work conducted in France by the European Center for Nuclear Research. Further, they claim that Fermilab (also named in the suit) can not actually be sued because it is not a legal entity, only a collection of buildings and test sites.

Will this end Dr. Wagner’s efforts to stop the project from going forward? Not likely. He addressed most of the issues raised by the government during our interview with him this week. (You can listen to the full replay at the link.) He questioned the findings of the safety study, calling several of their theories purely speculative. How his team plans to address the legal issues raised, I’m not sure.

Dr. Wagner also pointed out to us that it’s theoretically possible that none of this will matter in any event. There was a potential (lower than at the LHC) that the RHIC could have already spawned the microscopic black holes (MBHs) or strangelets which concern him. So, in theory, there could already be an MBH orbiting inside the Earth, or even the Sun. Dr. Wagner predicts that the LHC will go on line some time by the end of this year, with a similar danger extant.

Let’s move to the bonus round for all of you hard core armageddon enthusiasts out there. Wagner speculates that, at the low end of the theoretical range, a MBH generated by RHIC last year could collapse the Earth in roughly five years. The five year clock would put us at roughly December of 2012. Does that date ring a bell with anyone? (Insert evil grin here.)

See our previous coverage

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