We're not sure what it says that the two most-viewed posts in EnviroWonk's short history have both been about the European Center for Nuclear Research's (CERN) $8 billion science project known as the Large Hadron Collider -- and the controversies and conspiracy theories associated with the physics project.

We've manged to shoehorn the subject into an environmental policy blog due to the lawsuit filed last March in U.S. federal court alleging that CERN has not conducted a a proper environmental impact statement as required under NEPA. The suit sought to stop the final phase of LHC construction, which it did not. The lawsuit also gained widespread notoriety when the plaintiffs alleged that the experiment could open up a black hole that instantly consumes the entire planet, and possibly much more.

We've always wondered how exactly a lawsuit filed in U.S. federal court in Hawaii could apply to a project that is located near Geneva, Switzerland, and apparently the judge shared our confusion. She threw out the lawsuit on Sunday. In a 26-page ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Helen Gillmor said the plaintiffs -- a retired nuclear safety officer and a Spanish citizen who lives in Hawaii-- did not prove that the federal courts have jurisdiction over the subatomic particle accelerator.

Gillmor noted that the U.S. provided just $531 million for the construction of the $8 billion collider, which will attempt to re-create conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. "Neither the language nor the history of NEPA," she wrote, "suggest that it was intended to give citizens a general opportunity to air their policy objections to proposed federal actions."

Gillmor added that the proper venue for a debate over U.S. support for such projects is in Congress, not the federal courts.

What Gillmor did not address in her ruling are the end-of-universe scenarios that are the source of great concern for a very small minority of scientists. Most officials involved with the project -- including Stephen Hawking -- have said that accelerating protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts and slamming them together in a 17-mile-long underground loops poses little, if any, danger.

The judge left those scenarios alone, saying that the claim of planetary apocalypse was "a complex debate" of concern to more than just physicists.

In the meantime, don't expect to hear too much more about this issue until next spring. A day after officials activated the LHC earlier this month, the machine suffered a magnet malfunction, and more serious problems cropped up a week later. The problems will prevent further experiments for a least six months.