When it was announced, it was hailed as the greatest collaborative scientific undertaking in the history of humanity! The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor / ITER, based in southern France, was designed to produce clean energy through nuclear fusion – as happens in the sun. Nothing less than an “artificial sun”, so to speak: thousands of technicians of every kind from 35 countries set out to turn these plans into reality and to “switch them on”. (The familiar nuclear power plants generate energy through nuclear fission.)
But this pharaonic project has been generating problems from the very beginning, from the start of its construction in 2010. According to the original plans, the reactor was supposed to enter experimental operation in 2016; this proved impossible. The inauguration was postponed to 2025. But a year ago, in November 2022, the new director of the program, Pietro Barabaschi, stated that 2025 is no longer realistic, and that problems have emerged whose resolution is a matter not of weeks but of months or even years. The latest such problem announced was found in the lining of the reactor’s “burn chamber”: poor contacts between the special plates. They had been manufactured in South Korea, but during their transport to France they somehow “got knocked”…
This very techno-scientific “curiosity” for constructions of this kind could even be considered interesting. The serious problem begins with the funding of this “curiosity.” Constructions of such magnitude and complexity are bottomless barrels in terms of cost—we are talking about many billions. Such sums appear to be available, but they do not come from thin air. They are surplus value, that is, the result of the exploitation of labor, a portion of which ends up in state (or even “philomathic” private) coffers.
Those who actually fund such pharaonic endeavours, without being able to say a word about them, are not the states. It is the global proletariat. But, of course, when such projects succeed, it is never acknowledged as their owner…