By Dan Satherley
The Large Hadron Collider will be closed at the end of 2011 to fix faults in its design – but if a German woman had her way, it could have been shut down a lot sooner.
CERN, which runs the £5.6 billion project, says design flaws and safety issues have prompted the move.
"It's something that, with a lot more resources and with a lot more manpower and quality control, possibly could have been avoided," Dr Steve Meyers told the BBC.
"The standard phrase is that the LHC is its own prototype. We are pushing technologies towards their limits."
Later this month the collider will run at a world record 7 trillion electron volts (TeV), but scientists fear running it any higher – at its full 14TeV, for example – will irreversibly damage the groundbreaking machine at this stage.
"With a machine like the LHC, you only build one and you only build it once," said Dr Meyers.
The most expensive scientific experiment in history, the LHC has had a difficult first couple of years. Launched in September 2008, it was shut down nine days later when bad electrical wiring caused a helium leak. In 2005, a technician died whilst working in the underground tunnel that holds the LHC, when a crane dropped a load on him.
But those problems pale in significance to destroying the Earth – which is what many think the LHC will do when it's operating at its full capacity.
A German woman's lawsuit to halt experiments at the collider for this very reason was thrown out yesterday by Germany's highest court.
In a statement, the court said her case lacked "a coherent account… showing that the damage she fears would come about".
The misconception about the dangers of the LHC came about when some scientists suggested the atom-smasher could create "microscopic black holes", or unstable particles of 'strange' or 'dark matter'.
CERN acknowledges the LHC does have the potential to create black holes, but insists they would be so tiny and so unstable, they would cease existing before matter could start to accumulate.
No previous collider has shown any evidence that particle acceleration experiments can create other forms of matter, dangerous to Earth.
The LHC is located 100m below the border between France and Switzerland.
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