Just a little food for thought. While we are busily falling into line with materials policy dictates from Europe based on the precautionary principal, I thought you might find it interesting to see what is taking place in Europe with total disregard for the same principal. As you are probably aware the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project blew up last year during commissioning. The collider is able to collide particles with energy levels up to I believe 17TeV, and is in the process of being repaired prior to re-commissioning. At this power the scientists involved are expecting to find new particles and are also anticipating the production of 5 dimensional black holes as an outcome. The attached reference link is to the high energy particle physics site. The paper entitled "On the Possibility of Catastrophic Black Hole Growth in the Warped Brane-World Scenario at the LHC" Describes the "likely" size of such black holes and assures that they are not liable to reach a "critical mass" of 100Kg - at which point presumably everything in the area would be sucked into said black hole swiftly followed by the rest of the solar system.....they did not probe that scenario... Here are the links: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0901/0901.2948v2.pdf and... http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.2948 No I am not joking this is a real paper on a real site - and I for one just hope that their assumptions and math about particles they have never seen are correct. So much for the "precautionary principal"! John Burke