France has confirmed its opposition to proposals by the European Commission to withdraw funding of the ITER nuclear reactor from the EU budget. “A coalition of eight countries deems it inconceivable that the ITER and GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security), two symbolic integrated programmes with an international dimension, be dropped,” announced the French minister of research in Brussels, on 6 December.

In a joint letter at the beginning of November, the eight countries - France, Germany, Spain, Finland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Italy – had already expressed their opposition to the Commission’s proposal to remove the funding of these two programmes from the EU budget for the 2014-2020 period and to govern the budget by means of an intergovernmental agreement. A large sum of money is at stake: estimated at 5.7 billion euro for GMES and 2.36 billion euro for ITER.

Governing the financing of ITER by means of an intergovernmental agreement may cause certain countries to reconsider their contributions. Germany, for example, has decided to abandon nuclear and would be hard pushed to justify ITER funding.