Doomsday case back in court
Posted: Thursday, February 05, 2009 5:19 PM by Alan Boyle
CERN
A worker prepares a replacement magnet for the Large Hadron Collider's ring.
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The federal lawsuit against the world's largest particle-smasher may have been thrown out of court last year, but the plaintiffs have since filed an appeal, arguing that the judge was wrong when she said the U.S. legal system had no jurisdiction over the European science experiment.
The two plaintiffs, retired nuclear safety officer Walter Wagner and Spanish science writer Luis Sancho, had argued that full-scale operations at the Large Hadron Collider carried a risk of creating globe-gobbling black holes or other cosmic catastrophes. Those fears have been knocked down in a series of safety studies and research papers - including one that was put out just a couple of weeks ago.
Nevertheless, Sancho and Wagner are soldiering on.
Less than a month after U.S. District Judge Helen Gillmor dismissed the case in Honolulu back in September, the plaintiffs filed a notice of appeal with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. Their first brief in the case was due this week, and in that document, Sancho and Wagner take issue with Gillmor's ruling that the federal government did not play a major role in the European-led project. A copy of the brief was forwarded to me by James Tankersley, whose LHC Facts Web site is sympathetic to the plaintiffs' cause.
The brief rehashes the plaintiffs' worries about the collider. For a review of the scientific issues, you can check out this "Discovery or Doom" story, part of our special report on "The Big Bang Machine." But because the case was thrown out on legal rather than scientific grounds, the bulk of this week's brief dwells on the legal issues.
In a nutshell, the plaintiffs say the federal government's contribution of $531 million to LHC construction over more than 11 years, plus the U.S. consultative role on the project, are factors that add up to a "major federal action."
The judge ruled that the involvement was not a major federal action because the United States was not a voting member of Europe's CERN research council, and because the $531 million paled in comparison with CERN's $5 billion-plus contribution. (Most estimates currently run even higher, to a total construction cost of $10 billion.)
Judge Gillmor said that if the U.S. participation did not rise to the level of a major federal action, the federal court system did not have jurisdiction. At the end of her ruling, she strongly hinted that if the LHC's detractors wanted to stop U.S. involvement in the project, their main recourse should be to sway Congress. The plaintiffs, however, want the case to proceed in federal court.
The brief may be posted at some point to Wagner's LHCDefense Web site. Federal attorneys are due to file their own brief next month. Meanwhile, repairs are continuing on the LHC's magnet ring, which broke down shortly after its official startup in September. CERN says the repairs should be finished sometime this summer, leading to the collider's restart.
If this case follows the pattern set by Wagner's earlier challenges of the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider, the latest appeal is likely to be turned down on narrow legal grounds, perhaps even before the restart. There are likely to be multiple motions ahead, however.
In their brief, the plaintiffs say they want more hearings on the LHC's risks, and they won't be satisfied unless the LHC's experiments "can be proven to be impossible to destroy the Earth." The theoretical and experimental assurances that have been provided so far aren't good enough for them - and they may never be, when you consider how loath physicists are to say anything is absolutely impossible.
