Washington

United States participation in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project is secure for at least another year after the Clinton administration scotched a move in the Congress to end the collaboration (see Nature 388, 110; 1997).

According to administration officials, Federico Peña, the energy secretary, intervened personally last week to secure funding for ITER. Peña apparently persuaded Joseph McDade (Republican, Pennsylvania), chairman of the House of Representatives Energy and Water appropriations subcommittee, which funds energy research, and Vic Fazio (Democrat, California), its senior minority member, that the project should be fully funded.

The House subcommittee subsequently finalized a budget bill that would fund the fusion energy sciences programme at the administration's requested level of $225 million. The Senate subcommittee went further, increasing fusion funding to $240 million.

The bills proposed by both sub-committees would fund non-military science programmes at the Department of Energy at the level proposed by the Clinton administration in February (see Nature, 385, 569; 1997). High-energy physics, for example, would get $675 million — the same as last year — including $35 million for the US contribution to the European Large Hadron Collider project.

But the Senate bill would provide an additional $300 million for nuclear weapons research and maintenance, over and above the $4 billion proposed by the Clinton administration. Senator Pete Domenici (Republican, New Mexico), chair of the Senate panel, said the money was needed to maintain a larger than expected nuclear weapons stockpile. Half of the proposed increase would go to the Sandia and Los Alamos laboratories in Domenici's home state.