MEPs, the European Commission and national governments have reached a deal to find €1.3 billion for the EU’s contribution to building the international nuclear fusion project ITER.

Janusz Lewandowski, the European commissioner for financial programming and budget, said he was “relieved” that the Parliament and member states had found the extra funds that the EU has promised to provide to ITER over the next two years.

“The EU could not afford to lose credibility vis-à-vis its international partners involved in the project,” Lewandowski said.

The €1.3 billion will come from shifting funds from within the EU budget to cover ITER’s costs. A total of €840 million will be transferred from this year’s and next year’s budget. Of that amount €450m will be taken from the EU’s natural resources spending programme and €390m from the EU’s administrative budget. The rest of the money will come from an increase in the 2013 budget.

The Polish presidency of the EU’s Council of Ministers had already agreed with MEPs during the negotiations on the 2012 budget negotiations to move €100m from the EU’s Research Framework Programme to finance ITER.

Agreement on how to finance the EU’s contribution to the project has been blocked for months because of MEPs’ resistance to plans by member states and the Commission to shift millions from EU-funded research projects to provide funds for ITER. MEPs said it would be wrong to take funds away from projects which were making progress.

Talks on ITER financing have been taking place intermittently since last year. The Parliament has criticised the Commission and national governments for failing to come up with a long-term funding plan for the fusion project. The EU’s contribution would have risen to €7.2bn from a forecast €2.7bn in 2001, but the EU has capped its contribution at €6.6bn to encourage the project’s managers to make savings. The cost overruns have been blamed on delays in construction.