Question: what are the effects to earth from an particle asselarator if it explodes/

Kerrianne Harrington answered on 6 Nov 2017:

Interesting question! Particle accelerators are exciting and huge experiments with so many parts. I got to visit CERN as an undergraduate, which is so big it crosses country of France and Switzerland, and getting to appreciate just how huge the equipment is and with so many parts. They always do tours that are easy to book, so if you ever get travel nearby, I hope you get the chance to visit it! It’s beautiful.

My serious answer to this question is that nothing more interesting than a normal explosion in different type of lab. Provided nobody got hurt, you would get a lot of sad scientists mourning the loss of their experiments! There would be a lot of disappointed students, researchers and professors who would be sad they wouldn’t be able to collect anymore data.

Particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider have been studied for their safety, especially as the public became really concerned about micro black hole creations and the like. Safety assessments have shown them to not be dangerous to the public. The most dangerous thing I could think of is the explosion, that I’m imagining has been caused by something, would damage shielding and there could be radiation exposure. But there would be no wild escape of black holes or exotic particles, especially as beams are usually surrounded by concrete. They are very unlikely to explode, so I imagine if an explosion was made to happen it would just destroy equipment. The beam is unlikely to come into contact with anything other than concrete, and people would be evacuated more like a fire evacuation.

If you’re curious about what would happen if someone were to stick themselves into a particle accelerator while it was running, that’s also a really good question. There’s a wonderful video where they ask a bunch of scientists who work in this field, and most of their answers are “I don’t know, but it would probably be bad for you (and the experiment)!”