Disaster Scenarios at Nuclear Accelerators

The Bevalac accelerator was created at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in 1974 to study dense nuclear matter. The possibility that Lee-Wick density isomers could be formed and destroy the Earth was considered by an internal committee which concluded that the possibility was remote and the experiments should proceed. This was mentioned in an article in Physics Today in 1993, which resulted in the authors being put on the Unabomber's list. The RHIC accelerator at Brookhaven National Laboratory began operation in 2000 to create quark-gluon plasma. Concerns that strange quark matter or mini-black holes could be formed that would destroy the Earth were aired in the Sunday Times of London in 1999, which resulted in an open committee review whose report was published in Reviews of Modern Physics.