The True Cost of Over $50 Billion of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN CERN’s official website states $4.1 Billion for the accelerators and $1.4 Billion for the detectors - i.e. less than by one order of magnitude lower cost, thus openly lying to public.

CERN’s official annual report for 2012 states a total budget for the personnel of $594.6 million, which is about half of operational cost. This cost for 2,512 staff employees gives an average cost per CERN employee of $236,703 (which includes Applied Physicists, Craftsmen, Engineers, Technicians and Administrative Personnel etc.). This is a 38.6% increase of the average cost per CERN employee from 2003 which was $178,300 per employee (including fringe benefits, retirement, etc.).

Of the above mentioned 10,000 people working at CERN, let’s consider the 8,500 working on the LHC project (the others are considered to work for smaller but no less important experiments). Many of them are paid by their home institute, and less than 2,500 are paid by CERN at an average cost of $120,000 per employee per year (instead of considering $236,000/employee/year) for 18 years which totals $18.36 Billion.

This is way too good business for people involved for to let it go, don't you think?