NUCLEAR
It has been announced that the European Union’s Euratom research programme will receive significantly more money in order to fund the preparatory work for the construction of an experimental fusion reactor.
The total EU research and development budget is approximately $17.8 billion, of which a total of $1.4 billion (7.9 per cent) has been set aside for Euratom.
A further large portion of the Euratom budget will be used to fund investigations into decommissioning, leading to the withdrawal from nuclear power generation, which is aimed at a possible run-down of the current fission plants.
The EU Commission’s position on nuclear generation using fission plants is that no run-down could be completed before 2030. However, critics of the policy have claimed that the support of fusion research while also simultaneously supporting work on fission plant decommissioning represents a contradiction.