Last news BigBang Swiss, What happens, if anything goes wrong? (cnn)

The Large Hadron Collider -- built since 2003 at a cost of $3.8 billion -- will provide scientists with much greater power than ever before to smash the components of atoms in a bid to see how they are made.

The startup has been eagerly awaited by 9,000 physicists around the world who will conduct experiments here, though some skeptics have criticized the experiment, saying they fear the collisions of protons could eventually imperil Earth.

The skeptics theorize that a byproduct of the collisions could be micro black holes, subatomic versions of collapsed stars whose gravity is so strong they can suck in planets and other stars.

"It's nonsense," said James Gillies, chief spokesman for CERN, the host European Organization for Nuclear Research.

CERN is backed by leading scientists like Britain's Stephen Hawking in dismissing the fears and declaring the experiments to be absolutely safe.

Gillies told the AP that the most dangerous thing that could happen would be if a beam at full power were to go out of control, and that would only damage the accelerator itself and burrow into the rock around the tunnel deep below the Swiss-French border.

And full power is probably a year away.

"On Wednesday we start small," Gillies said. "What we're putting in to start with is one single low intensity bunch at low energy and we thread that around. We get experience with low energy things and then we ramp up as we get to know the machine better."