Did design flaws doom the LHC?

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. Related news picks All news picks LHC now world’s most powerful collider LHC breaks the 1 TeV per beam mark First collisions occur in the LHC New plans for fixing and using the LHC LHC repair plan points to weaknesses in original design Late start for Large Hadron Collider