The tenth meeting of the Panel of Experts on the ILC (Chair: Shinichi Hirano, former president of Nagoya University) was held at the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT) on June 19th. There, members discussed possible the best way to work with other countries. They will put together their opinions at the next meeting.

Eleven members were in attendance. An official from MEXT talked about their visits with French and German government officials that took place in March and May of this year.

According to MEXT, France’s position is that when deciding to bring about a large-scale project, consideration must be made towards what should be prioritized scientifically, and how to deal with financial issues. They also recognized that the changed ILC plan (from 31km to 20km) will still clearly be able to precisely study the Higgs boson particle. Germany stated that there are some concerns among researchers the new plan limits the ILC’s potential, and they are not sure if the ILC will really be able to uncover new physics.

Some comments from the members: “It will be necessary to clearly explain to the other countries that the ILC will still be a scientifically worthwhile project even after the changes” and “The issue in Japan is that it is very difficult for us to shoulder the costs. We need to dig deep to uncover how each country feels about cost-sharing.”
Chair Hirano said, “For our next meeting, I hope to have a final round-up discussion, keeping in consideration all of the opinions given thus far.”

Nomura Research Institute reported that they edited their figures regarding the economic spillover effects of the ILC. After re-examining the operation costs of the construction period, they changed the figure to a range of 2.3776 to 2.6109 trillion yen.