French decree authorises International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor

The French government has given the green light to the construction of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) on the Cadarache nuclear site, in the South of France. The aim of the project is to master the nuclear fusion technique. It should receive annual EU funding of €515 million under the next framework programme for research Horizon 2020 – provided the Council sticks to the budget proposed by the European Commission.

The French decree, published on 10 November, follows requests for authorisation made successively in 2008 and 2010 by the ITER organisation, and several opinions in 2012 – including, recently, one from the French authority for nuclear safety (Autorité française pour la sûreté nucléaire, ASN).

In the scientific world, the project certainly does not meet with unanimous approval. Some big names in physics say the project is excessively costly and unusable, and some French NGOs see it as a provocation given that France is shortly set to open a national debate on energy transition.

MEP Michèle Rivasi (Greens-EFA, France), member of the EP’s Committee on Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE), said it was a non-manageable project that has been criticised by plasma physicians and even by Masatoshi Koshiba (Japanese Nobel Prize for Physics laureate).

The ITER project – its entry into service is not planned for another 25 years – aims to prove that it is possible to maintain the fusion of two atoms (for ITER : tritium and deuterium) capable of generating 500 MW of electricity for six minutes. In the second phase, promoters will try to maintain fusion reactions for at least 16 minutes. The ITER ‘tokamak’ – a device using a magnetic field to confine a plasma in the shape of a torus – is the main focus of scientific criticism.

Lion’s share

The EU is one of the seven partners (along with China, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the US) of the project. Because of this, the ITER has already received funds from the EU’s nuclear research budget. The financing of fusion research has reached €594 million per annum on average under the 7th Framework Programme for Research. The Commission is proposing to step this up to nearly 11%, ie €657 million per annum under Horizon 2020, which should start in 2014, for seven years. Out of this ‘fusion total’, €142 million should be allocated to research into fusion carried out as part of Euratom, and the rest, ie €515 million, to the ITER project. As a framework for reference, the annual budget allocated by the EU to nuclear fission is currently €58 million and should be €71 million under Horizon 2020. Furthermore, the nuclear research activities carried out in the Commission’s Joint Research Centres (JRCs) would rise from €107 million to €145 million per annum.