The true cost of the ILC

In his story on the proposed International Linear Collider (ILC), Bert Schwarzschild does his usual meticulous job of reporting the news on particle physics and cosmology (Physics Today, April 2007, page 26 ). But behind the cost figures presented, there’s a deeper story that he did not discuss.

The $7.5 billion total estimate cited is what such a collider might cost according to European accounting practices, assuming it were located at an existing laboratory, like CERN, that could absorb much of the construction management, R&D, and other costs into its normal operating budget. Nor does it include the costs of experimental detectors, contingency, or inflation. Adding those costs would push the total well north of $10 billion, by my calculations. If, as many of us hope, the ILC were to be built in the US, the Department of Energy would insist that all of the other costs be included, making it—as correctly reported in Science—a $10 billion to $15 billion project.

Advocates of the ILC are taking a risky path that resembles all too closely the one followed by promoters of the Superconducting Super Collider in its formative years. In that case the additional costs were ignored, and only that of the collider itself was given during the early going. Thus the project initially seemed much less expensive than it eventually turned out to be. But as the SSC price tag rose from $3 billion in 1986 to to $5.9 billion in 1989 to more than $10 billion in 1993, it steadily lost political support—which was quite strong initially—and was finally terminated by Congress.

With such a track record lurking in its recent past, the US particle-physics community can ill afford to start down such a tortuous (and torturous) road again. We need to play the costing game straight this time and be honest about what the ILC will really cost, or it won’t have a chance of getting off the blocks—at least not in this country.