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.
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