October 1st, 2008
Anti-LHC lawsuit lands in legal black hole
A lame-brain lawsuit to stop the Large Hadron Collider is dead. U.S. District Judge Helen Gillmor has dismissed the suit because U.S. courts have no jurisdiction over the world’s biggest atom-smasher based in Switzerland and France and built by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, The New York Times reports.
The suit was filed by Walter Wagner, a retired radiation safety officer, and Luis Sancho, a science writer and professor in Barcelona. They claim the collider could create a black hole that would destroy the earth. They sued CERN, the United States Dept. of Energy, the National Science Foundation and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in federal District Court in Hawaii.
But with the U.S. government contributing just $531 million of the collider’s $8 billion construction bill, the judge held that U.S. involvement was too minor to give the court jurisdiction under the National Environmental Policy Act. Wrote the judge:
Neither the language nor the history of NEPA suggest that it was intended to give citizens a general opportunity to air their policy objections to proposed federal actions.
