committed Jordan to the project during the meeting in a signed letter addressed to the Director General of UNESCO. After long discussions and a series of votes, Jordan was formally approved to be the host of the Centre at the third meeting of the SESAME Interim Council in June 2000. Egypt and Iran withdrew their proposals before the final round of voting. The decision was ratified by 9 votes in favour and 1 abstention. Jordan was seen as an appropriate location for the project because it was the only country at the time to have maintained diplomatic relations with all other founding members: Bahrain, Cyprus, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, the Palestinian Authority, and Turkey. Cost The project cost around $98 million, with $5 million donated each by Jordan, Israel, Turkey, Iran and the European Union. The rest was donated by CERN from existing equipment. Jordan became the greatest contributor to the project by donating land and building construction costs, and by pledging to build a $7 million solar power plant; this will make SESAME the first accelerator in the world to be powered by renewable energy. The annual operational cost of $6 million is pledged by the members according to the size of their economies. Funding As well as the drawn-out process in deciding which country should host SESAME, the project came across several other difficulties on its path to completion. Possibly the largest issue was its funding. Because the major components of the laboratory from the decommissioned BESSY I experiment, originally valued at $60 million, were being donated by the German government, funding on that front was not an issue. However, the German government stipulated that the cost of dismantling, including documentation, packing and transport, had to be provided by SESAME. The cost was an estimated $600,000, and had to be guaranteed before the end of 1999 because the BESSY building had been promised to the Max Planck Society. Schopper had been informed of this condition only a few hours before the Interim Council meeting, and asking for voluntary contributions would have been ineffective because most delegates at the meeting would not have had the authority to make financial decision. After a discussion between the Interim Council, the United States State Department, Sweden and Russia agreed to provide $200,000. Schopper saw only one possible option to save the project. He asked UNESCO Director General Koichiro Matsuura to arrange an