The organization that represents the European Union’s major interests in the giant international fusion energy research and engineering project ITER, located in Caderache, France, has seen the firing of a long-time, key manager and upset among the technical and support staff of the multi-billion-dollar project.
Fusion for Energy (F4E) has fired its long-time director, Johannes Schwemmer, effective Thursday (June 16). He was named director in 2016 and was in his second term, due to expire Dec. 31, 2023. New Energy Times reported, “Schwemmer had a history of making false and exaggerated claims about the purpose and design objective of the ITER project. Two years ago, he was directed by Kadri Simson, the European Commissioner responsible for the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Energy, to make corrections to his organization’s public claims.”’
Schwemmer had long been controversial. In 2021, Michael Claessens, former chief spokesman for the ITER, including F4E, reported to the European Commission, the European Parliament, and other relevant government organizations, that “the ITER Organization is silencing or firing its employees who speak openly and honestly of problems with the reactor and who veer from the official discourse” He was among those fired, after charging that the governing bodies for the project where overstating its progress and its promise.
In January, Politico’s European edition reported, “The EU agency responsible for the bloc’s contribution to the global ITER nuclear fusion project is under fire from labor unions, which allege that a culture of overwork, stress and abusive management led to illness among workers and an employee’s suicide.
“They warn that could derail the €44 billion scheme, aimed at researching the feasibility of mimicking what happens inside a star to produce clean energy.”
ITER, formerly known by the full name International Thermal Experimental Reactor (in Latin, iter means “the path,”) had its beginning in 1978 with an international program to develop a Tokomak fusion project. While the project moved forward with little attention beyond technical circles, it burst upon the public scene during the 1985 Geneva summit between U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Union General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev.
In Geneva, the two major world leaders agreed to cooperate on fusion R&D, issuing a statement that said that “the potential importance of the work aimed at utilizing controlled thermonuclear fusion for peaceful purposes and, in this connection, advocated the widest practicable development of international cooperation in obtaining this source of energy, which is essentially inexhaustible, for the benefit of all mankind.” Reagan then touted the collaboration in a joint session of the U.S. Congress.
International politics has always been in the DNA of nature of ITER. Former spokesman Claessens said in his whistleblower account to the European leaders, “The key here is that ITER is most definitely a political project. It was launched by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 and ever since, the project has been managed by politicians, who sit on the ITER Council, the project’s top-level governing board, composed of representatives of the governments of each ITER member, and by scientists at the political level in the ITER Organization. ITER can be considered as a ‘political technology,’ defined by Robert Bell (1998) as a technology developed and showcased for political reasons.”
The EU is the major force in the ITER project, contributing some 45% of its funding.
–Kennedy Maize
Twitter (kennedymaize)