What a complete waste of money,should be spent on cancer research or other medical problems that need sorting,if you want a big bang get a massive hammer
In a way it is. Most of the radio-active isotopes used in medicine - like medical imaging etc come from a few ( a very few ) nuclear reactors, mostly in canada - needs a very specific design to make them. However, with about 2/3 of the worldd production reactors shut down currently - due to a number of unrelated issues - then there is a world shortage - been a lot about it in the paper recently. People are dying because no one knows they are sick.
The LHC will produce vast amounts of these isotopes when a couple of times a year. It should come close to doubling the world supply. And it's far better supported than most nuclear reactors and so should be a fairly stable source.
And, even if you don't care about the science itself - and it could end up being pretty important - the LHC is already being useful.
The last machine that used the same hole - LEP - was the catalyst for the world wide web to be created. Setting aside issues such as without LEP you wouldn't be reading this site, the internet saves lives, in a minor way becuase of clever technology that uses it ( of all the contracts I've done, I'm most proud that I ran a project that "joined up" a number of ambulance services over the WWW in 2006, which saves approx 400 lives/year ) but far - FAR - more importantly because people like cancer researchers can now share and collaborate on research that they could never do before, and vast numbers of lives have been saved by this, and vast numbers of cancers halted or cured.
The LHC will go one better - it is creating The Grid, which will be the most vast super-computer ever in terms of power and storage. And a whole new structure that it is highly likely that most computer applications will move over to in time. No more desk top PC's in the future - just the grid, or a copy of it.
The Grid will allow modelling and research to be done - and protien folding for cancer theapy is the first "non-atom-smashing" role it's being lined up for. No more research taking years in a lab, it will now take days or even hours on the Grid.
And also, something as powerful as the grid will make drug testing much easier, which will make it easier to get good medicine certified by the US. Which means lots of other countries - like the UK - will follow it's lead. And then lives REALLY start getting saved.
incidental to this, the LHC will also tell us how the world works. Either it find the "Higgs boson" you've probably read about, and in the process discovers super-symetry, and then a whole new world of micro-chips, encryption, optics and god knows what else opens up in front of us - and who knows what sort of amazing things will come from all that, or we find that there's no Higgs there. And turn particle physics and big dollops of quantum theory on it's head. And that will be REALLY good - becuase then we'll have to find what really is going on. All the electronics over the last 60 years have come from the current version of quantum theory, which came from particle theory ( plus some other stuff, but mostly particle physics )
Transistors, LED's, Hall probles, diodes, binary theory, computers, MRI scanners, flouesent light...... everything. If we have to scrap it and start again - who knows what we'll find. But it'll be fun watching it happen!
Steve