European Union (EU) ministers in December approved emergency spending for ITER to see the France-based research project through 2012 and 2013, and now the Commission is looking ahead for four more years’ money.
It has proposed the creation of a ‘Supplementary Research Programme’, funded via the EU’s nuclear energy wing Euratom, which would ensure Europe kept its funding bargain for ITER with the project’s six other parties: China, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia, and the USA. ITER’s aim is to produce a fully-functioning nuclear fusion reactor capable or commercial replication and development. However, with EU budgets under pressure, and ITER’s projected costs spiralling beyond the initial EU cost contribution estimate of EUR 6.6 billion, the EU has struggled to find the necessary budgets.
Asking EU ministers to back the new plan, a European Commission note said: “An important feature of the construction of ITER is the extreme technical challenge. With its unprecedented scale and complexity, it represents a major undertaking with contributions in civil, mechanical, electrical and nuclear engineering.” And it added that ITER and other large scale EU projects of interest (such as the Galileo global positioning satellite project), ITER was “disproportionately expensive in relation to the small EU budget and they tend to overrun initial cost projections.”
By Keith Nuthall