LHC - Cost

Cost

See also: List of megaprojects

With a budget of 7.5 billion euros (approx. $9bn or £6.19bn as of Jun 2010), the LHC is one of the most expensive scientific instruments ever built. The total cost of the project is expected to be of the order of 4.6bn Swiss francs (approx. $4.4bn, €3.1bn, or £2.8bn as of Jan 2010) for the accelerator and SFr 1.16bn (approx. $1.1bn, €0.8bn, or £0.7bn as of Jan 2010) for the CERN contribution to the experiments.

The construction of LHC was approved in 1995 with a budget of SFr 2.6bn, with another SFr 210M towards the experiments. However, cost overruns, estimated in a major review in 2001 at around SFr 480M for the accelerator, and SFr 50M for the experiments, along with a reduction in CERN's budget, pushed the completion date from 2005 to April 2007. The superconducting magnets were responsible for SFr 180M of the cost increase. There were also further costs and delays due to engineering difficulties encountered while building the underground cavern for the Compact Muon Solenoid, and also due to faulty parts provided by Fermilab. Due to lower electricity costs during the summer, it is expected that the LHC will normally not operate over the winter months, although an exception was made to make up for the 2008 start-up delays over the 2009/10 winter.

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