European Parliament rejects plan to increase budget for ITER fusion reactor

A proposal to fund a multi-billion-euro fusion experiment through cuts in Europe’s research budget has met with a frosty reception in the European Parliament, which must ultimately give its imprimatur to the deal.

ITER is a planned giant, superconducting reactor that will squeeze hydrogen isotopes together until they fuse into helium. The process, which is analogous to reactions that power the sun, will release more energy than it produces.

But to get there, ITER will have to absorb more money than expected. The project was previously budgeted at about €5 billion (US$6.5 billion) to build. The latest estimates put it at somewhere around €16 billion. As host of the seven-party project, Europe will have to pony up some €7.2 billion between now and 2019, over twice what it budgeted for.

The budget gap is especially nasty in the 2012-2013 timeframe, when the European Commission estimates it will have to come up with €1.4 billion in extra funding. The Commission initially proposed a loan, or that member states suck it up and pay. The member states, in their European manifestation as the Council of Ministers (like the League of Extraordinary Gentleman, except not really), said “Nuh-uh”.

In July, the two sides struck a compromise: around a third of the money would come from European research programmes, with two-thirds coming from elsewhere, including the agriculture budget, which has money unspent.

The deal seemed to pave the way for ITER to proceed, but now the parliament, an elected body that co-governs with the Council of Ministers, is balking at the plan. According to a story in European Voice, parliament’s budget committee has rejected the compromise, throwing the whole process back into turmoil.

Time to panic? Not according to Mark English, a spokesman for the commission, who told me that “all of the European institutions: the commission, council, and parliament have made clear their commitment to ITER”.

Talks will continue, with the hope of reaching a deal by 2012, when the money really starts to get tight. In the meantime, construction cranes have popped up on the site near Cadarache, France

Nature