Black Holes In My Backyard?

A few blocks down the road from my house (literally) is the Fermilab Particle Accelerator. Fermilab's four-mile Tevatron collides subatomic particles and was the world's highest-energy particle accelerator. Oh, and they have a buffalo range! Now, however, the Large Hadron Collider is being built straddling the Swiss and French borders on the outskirts of Geneva. It is a circular tunnel almost 17 miles in circumference. I know a bit about the Hadron Collider because Fermilab plays an important part in the local economy and now Fermi may need to expand to remain useful (size does matter). I'm also a science dork. I've never thought much about the dangers of living so close to the collider (I ain't 'fraid no subatumnic parsicles) but the Lifeboat Foundation is listing some serious warnings regarding Hadron. The Hadron collider will be smashing protons moving at 99.999999% of the speed of light into each other to recreate conditions existing a fraction of a second after the big bang.

"According to some theoretical models, tiny black holes could be produced in collisions at the LHC. They would then very quickly decay into what is known as Hawking radiation (the tinier the black hole, the faster it evaporates) which would be detected by experiments."

As the Lifeboat site points out, "Any physicist will tell you that there is no way to prove that generated black holes will decay! The consequences of being mistaken are unfathomable." Unfathomable indeed! What are your thoughts? A legitimate danger? Is the Lifeboat Foundation a bunch of knuckleheads? (They have their own official song and a MySpace page.) Will tiny black holes replace my garbage disposal and/or toilet? Hell yeah!