The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) would be forced to close at the end of 2011 for a year to address design and safety issues, a BBC report quoted Steve Myers, director for accelerators and technology, on March 10 2010 as saying.

"There is nothing wrong with LHC - lazy journalism," Brian Cox, physicist and member of the ATLAS collaboration at the LHC, commented on the report via Twitter.

Jonathan Butterworth, a University College of London physicist who also works on the LHC, said the schedule for the operation of the LHC was announced in early February 2010, at a summary presentation of an LHC Performance Workshop that had been held in Chamonix, France, in late January.

In a media statement from February 3, Myers said that "the most important decision we reached is to run the LHC for 18 to 24 months at a collision energy of 7 TeV (3.5 TeV per beam). After that, we’ll go into a long shutdown in which we’ll do all the necessary work to allow us to reach the LHC’s design collision energy of 14 TeV for the next run."

The LHC was run at half-power, seven trillion electron volts, because "we’ve known for some time that work is needed to prepare the LHC for running at energies significantly higher than the 7 TeV collision energy we’ve chosen for the first physics run," Myers said.

"A long run now is the right decision for the LHC and for the experiments. It gives the machine people the time necessary to prepare carefully for the work that’s needed before allowing 14 TeV. And for the experiments, 18 to 24 months will bring enough data across all the potential discovery areas to firmly establish the LHC as the world’s foremost facility for high-energy particle physics," Myers said.

The LHC has been under criticism since the start of its experiments in 2008 because some believe the experiments could create a black hole large enough to cause the end of the world.

As recently as early March 2010, a German federal court threw out an application to halt experiments at the LHC for fear they would destroy the Earth, UK broadcaster The Press and Journal said. According to the newspaper, the court ruled that the complaint had failed to demonstrate any connection between the experiments and potential apocalypse.

With the start of the latest experiments in February 2010, the LHC had entered "the longest phase of accelerator operation in CERN’s history, scheduled to take us into summer or autumn 2011," Myers said in February 2010.

"Its bloody running now, and will run until the end of 2011 !!!" Cox said on Twitter.