• Question: Howmuch money, in total, has gone into your work to fund your projects?

    Asked by mrjordiec to Ben, Jony, Katharine, Mark, Peter on 17 Nov 2011.
    • Photo: Mark Basham

      Mark Basham answered on 16 Nov 2011:

      Hi mrjordiec

      Difficult question, but I can tell you that Diamond Light Source as a whole has had about Half a billion pounds funding since it started being built in 2003. But that’s to fund me and about 200 other scientists, and help lots of users, Interestingly I have no idea how many users we have so I have just asked and will post a comment at some point

      Mark

      UPDATE —

      Wow apparently we have had over 11 thousand user visits to Diamond since it opened in 2007. Hopefully lots of happy customers 🙂

    • Photo: Peter Williams

      Peter Williams answered on 16 Nov 2011:

      On the accelerators we currently run at Daresbury (ALICE and EMMA), about £50M. The SRS ran from 1980 – 2008 and probably had a capital investment of the order of a billion (we reckon it generated 20 times this amount in economic activity for the UK, and 2 Nobel prizes). We could also lay claim to at least some of the amount Mark says about Diamond – our group did the original design work for that machine.

      On the other projects around the world, well the international linear collider has been put on hold because of the projected cost – approaching £10 billion. But the LHC luminosity upgrade is going ahead – a couple of hundred million for that.

    • Photo: Jony Hudson

      Jony Hudson answered on 16 Nov 2011:

      My experiments are much cheaper “only” a few million pounds!

    • Photo: Katharine Schofield

      Katharine Schofield answered on 17 Nov 2011:

      Well, let me try to put some of these numbers in context…STFC’s budget is about £600m a year, and the research councils in total (there are seven of them of which STFC is one, they all cover different areas of research) together get about £3billion a year to spend. Now, that sounds like an awful lot of money (and it is), but have a look at this link:
      http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2011/11/08/Public_spending_2710.pdf
      This is a ‘blobbogram’ showing all the things the Government spends money on. The bigger the blob, the more money goes into it. The science blob is towards the bottom in orange/yellow, and then the research councils blob is an offshoot from that. I think this diagram is a brilliant way to visualise where all the money goes.

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