If splitting the atom causes a nuclear reaction , then surely what they do is highly dodgy???
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Does the Hadron Collider pose a threat to mankind/earth?
None at all. The Earth is regularly hit bit cosmic rays with energys far above the energies produced by the LHC.
If splitting the atom causes a nuclear reaction , then surely what they do is highly dodgy???
The only people who think that way are the people who never had the chance to visit such facilities. You have a few over there in the USA that you can visit; if you live near Chicago, you can visit the Fermilab which has a similar (but smaller) storage ring, called the Tevatron. It has run for several years, but unfortunately shut down two months ago after it reached the end of its useful life.
Anyway, you have "atoms splitting up" in your body, right now. That's what happens in nuclear decays anyway; things like the carbon-14 decay, whose rate you can use to measure the age of organic materials, and which occur naturally (they have nothing to do with the LHC and are not caused by it, and it happens regardless of the LHC existing or not). Those carbon-14 decays ARE "nuclear reactions". Other examples of nuclear reactions is what happens for example when you do a PET scan; but although those are nuclear reactions they are so low in number that they won't produce any significant effect in your body.
What is scaring you is that you have no idea of what is the rate of such decays that is necessary to produce an effect. But the thing is, when you do an X-ray you expose yourself to about the same rate of events as what is produced at the LHC; the difference is that you're only exposed by a fraction of a second, which is not enough to produce effects. For the LHC, each bunch crossing produces 10 reactions (about 1 in a billion of the bunch particles), and the rest of the bunch move away. So it's not like they have a "bomb" in there.