Nature News: Running more than a year behind schedule and at half its intended energy, the world's most powerful particle accelerator is slated to begin its first full scientific run this week. Along with relief, the occasion is bringing some soul-searching. One senior scientist who helped to build the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe's particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, is claiming that the cause of the delay—a major accident in 2008—could have been avoided.
"Any technical fault is a human fault," says Lucio Rossi, a physicist who oversaw the production of the accelerator's superconducting magnets. In a paper published this week, he concludes that the catastrophic failure of a splice between two magnets was not a freak accident but the result of poor design and lack of quality assurance and diagnostics. The project, he says, will be coping with the consequences for many months to come.
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Very sad to see such an ambitious project be doomed because a small human error.
I guess lots of money was wasted through this but errors happen and should be forgiven.