Saturday, May 09, 2009

Austria is Leaving CERN

The cost of being a member nation in CERN is weighing too much on Austria. The country plans to leave CERN and stop its contribution to the high energy physics laboratory.

Austria has been a member of the 20-nation body since 1959, but plans to leave because membership ties up around 70 percent of its budget for funding such international research, Science Minister Johannes Hahn said late Thursday.

"In the meantime there have been diverse research projects in the European Union which offer a very large number of different scientists' perspectives," Hahn said in a statement.

Austria contributes 2.2 percent of CERN's budget. It will be the first country to leave the organization since Spain's departure in 1969. Spain rejoined in 1983.


Zz.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Do they have their own accelerator facility? Otherwise it will kill experimental particle physics i Austria