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I want tight control over this thing - I'll happily live with an incomplete knowledge of how "everything works" to make sure we don't cause a physics calamity here on Earth.

Most discoveries in science come not from someone saying "Eureka!", they come from a scientist saying "What the...". I don't want a WTF moment coming from such a high-energy collision, thank you very much.

The discovery of the Higgs last year was the end of a successful chapter of late 20th Century physics.

This discovery is so abstract, being a statistical analysis of trillions upon trillions of events, that there is literally nothing to show for it. Not one of these events involved the detection of a Higgs Boson, per se. Here is the photograph that constitutes the discovery of the positron in 1932, 4 years after it was hypothesized by Dirac. There it is. That's a discovery.

When I read the article I got a tad squeamish when I saw 'Engineer' Katy Foraz say "lots and lots". Not to mention how the photo caption reads or it showing her wearing her Bicycle Helmet

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(or it's the funniest looking Hardhat I've seen in 43 years)

So I did some 'Binging' and found a few other interesting links like this other article with Hot Links embedded to some official reports 'Engineer' Katy Foraz has written going back to 2008 about the LCH, its construction, and ... uh .. quality control*.

I just skimmed through the first report (quality control link above) she wrote but from what I gathered it sure seems that what's going on here is not an 'upgrade', but as the critics say a costly repair which should have been caught during construction. This 'upgrade' is needed so the LCH can run at full capacity as it should have from day one. Its been running at 50% and now CERN is spinning this repair, oops 'upgrade', as doubling its power. (Huh?)

* you may get a 'security warning' from Firefox if you click the link to CERN but it is okay. Could be because the CERN server is in Switzerland.