I understand that the LHC will help answer some physics questions, but is all this expense and effort going to contribute to any practical technology gains? Will it help us find new energy sources? What will we actually get out of it??
There's some irony that twenty years later you're able to use the very technology spawned by that proposal to write a comment asking whether all the expense and effort of the LHC and CERN will have any practical technological gains.
Physicists hope that the LHC will help answer the most fundamental questions in
physics, questions concerning the basic laws governing the interactions and
forces among the elementary objects, the deep structure of space and time,
especially regarding the intersection of quantum mechanics and general
relativity, where current theories and knowledge are unclear or break down
altogether.
To address your question, I am sorry, I don't really know if they have any practical applications in mind. But I am certain (=believe) that practical applications will come out of this.
As any deeper understanding of the universe inevitably leads to practical applications, I should think.
For many years the laser was considered to be a "solution looking for a problem", yet today they are absolutely ubiquitous in numerous applications and have contributed to the well-being of human-kind in innumerable ways (surgery, communication, safety, etc.)
When Maxwell studied the theory of electromagnetism it was absolutely blue sky research with questionable practicality. Yet the fruit of that research served as the foundation of innumerable inventions in the 19th and 20th centuries, easily responsible for hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of goods and services to be produced and delivered to people.
http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps....
This is it. The whole game. And finding out how stuff works is quite noble enough without any benefits.