The Cern Laboratory has rejected suggestions from the UK's former chief scientist that projects such as its Large Hadron Collider, nick-named the "God Machine", is distracting valuable resources from climate change research, insisting that the lab could help deliver numerous new clean technologies.

Speaking ahead of the presidential address at the BA Science Festival in Liverpool yesterday, Sir David King told reporters there was a need for a " re-think of priorities in science and technology" to increase the focus on solving practical challenges such as climate change.

In a thinly veiled swipe at the Cern Laboratory's research to try and find a mechanism that explains why matter has mass – which will reach a major milestone tomorrow with the turning on of the world's largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider – hinted that much of the funding donated towards pure science projects should be diverted to fund research into clean energy.

"It's all very well to demonstrate that we can land a craft on Mars, it's all very well to discover whether or not there is a Higgs boson [a potential mass mechanism]," he said. "But I would just suggest that we need to pull people towards perhaps the bigger challenges where the outcome for our civilisation is really crucial."

However, James Gillies, spokesman for the Cern Laboratory, rejected outright King's criticism, insisting that the Lab's research was likely to deliver numerous "spin off" discoveries, many of which could benefit the environment and help tackle climate change.

"I don't think King has the slightest point," he told BusinessGreen.com. "Major advances can always be traced back to fundamental science. If when Isaac Newton was working on the laws of motion, someone said that he should be focusing on medical research that would be very persuasive, but what he achieved has underpinned countless technical advances."

Gillies added that the work undertaken at Cern had already provided the foundations for numerous breakthroughs in cancer research, noting that of the 17,000 particle accelerators used around the world half are housed in hospitals.

He also argued that the lab had also undertaken research that could help in the treatment of radioactive waste. Citing work by the Nobel Prize winning physicist Carlo Rubbia into whether particle accelerators could be used to develop a new form of nuclear energy based on thorium rather than uranium, Gillies explained that it was now thought that accelerating protons into lead results in the release of neutrons that can simultaneously be used to break up radioactive waste material in the form of polonium and trigger a reaction in thorium that releases nuclear energy.

"The research Cern did in the 1990s suggests that using thorium [as a nuclear fuel] is entirely plausible," said Gillies. "It is an energy efficient reaction, with no possibility of a chain reaction and no long term waste storage issues."

In addition to research on the treatment of nuclear waste, Cern is also using Proton accelerators to model the impact of cosmic rays on cloud formation – a phenomenon that is not yet fully understood and is sometimes seized upon by global warming sceptics as a means of suggesting man's impact on the climate may not be as pronounced as many climate scientists believe.

Gillies also predicted that the discoveries made by the Large Hadron Collider would have numerous other spin off applications that are not yet fully understood. "We are categorically not saying that there should not be more research on climate change," he said. "But pitting one form of science against another is not the way forward... discoveries made here will deliver benefits for hundreds of years as people work out how to apply the new understanding that is gained."