LHC: $6.6bn spin drier?

Work at the $6.6bn Large Hadron Collider near Geneva has halted due to a magnet failure it was revealed today, and the infernal contraption, labelled a doomsday device by some, will be out of action for at least two months as a result.

The over-priced gizmo, designed to smash together particles at near light speed, has already been labelled a bungle by some after it’s much hyped power-up last week failed to bring about the apocalypse.

Yesterday’s failure is thought to have caused a number of the devices supercooled electromagnets to have increased in temperature, and they will now need to be warmed further before repairs can take place. The Top Banana’s resident plumber, “Shifty” Sven Swieghorn knows nothing whatsoever about particle accelerators, but as a tradesman who frequently deals with really long pipes commented “[The LHC] looks like a cowboy job to me, love. I reckon the whole lot will have to come out.”

Sources within the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) which runs the project were unavailable to comment on Sven’s assessment, nor would they confirm or deny that a failure to install the recently released Service Pack 3 for Windows XP may have been behind the failure. Cern spokesman James Gillies would only state that the organisation’s I.T. specialists had assessed the problem fully from their end and were confident that computer systems were not to blame.

“Having conversed with the sad, speccy bastards in the broom cupboard we have ruled out computer error, even going so far as to switch it off and on again” he said. “We are instead focusing our efforts on ascertaining wether the failure was due to intervention by a well known star of the silver screen or, potentially, the leakage of over a ton of liquid helium from a component into the tunnel housing the accelerator. Actually yeah, that was probably it.”

The failure occurred during the final stages of testing the device, and scientists will now have to wait until after repairs are made before they can finally arrange an atom fight. Sky TV, due to air the fight as a pay-per-view event, were unavailable for comment.