FRANCE: A group of 30 countries has signed an agreement to develop the world's most advanced nuclear fusion reactor. The €10 billion project hopes to produce a reactor that delivers more energy than it consumes by 2016.
The planned International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (Iter) will begin construction in France at Cadarache, near Marseille, in 2008. It will take another eight years, however, before the reactor will begin to operate.
The funders joined at a signing ceremony yesterday in Paris hosted by the French president Jacques Chirac.
"If nothing changes, humanity will have consumed in 200 years most of the fossil fuel resources accumulated over hundreds of millions of years, provoking at the same time a veritable climate calamity," president Chirac said. "It [ Iter] is a victory in the general interest of humanity."
The EU, the US, Japan, India, Russia, South Korea and China agreed to fund the hugely challenging project despite the fact that there are no guarantees Iter will work at all.
Decades of fusion research have so far failed to deliver a fusion reactor that can give off more energy than it consumes. Yet the benefits should Iter prove successful are enormous.
In a fusion reactor, powerful magnetic fields force hydrogen atoms together to form helium and enormous amounts of heat, the same process that powers the sun. A self-sustaining fusion reaction operates at temperatures reaching 100 million degrees, one of the many technical problems posed by fusion.
Proponents argue that fusion produces less radioactive waste than existing nuclear plants and relies on a cheap, near limitless energy source - hydrogen. Fusion would also, conventional nuclear reactors, avoid the output of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.
Critics however point to the enormous scientific challenge of building a commercially viable fusion reactor, claiming such an achievement could be 50 years away. They also highlight the limits to progress seen over several decades of scientific effort.
The goal of Iter is to show fusion can be controlled to produce electricity. It would deliver useable power but also provide valuable discoveries to help in the construction of a full-scale fusion power plant.
"It is the first time that more than half of the world is standing together shoulder-to-shoulder and looking a technological challenge in the eye and telling it with confidence: thou shalt be conquered," the head of India's department of atomic energy, Anil Kakodkar, stated yesterday.
The announcement came as Britain's prime minister Tony Blair visited the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant in Cumbria yesterday.
He gave his strongest indication yet that new nuclear power stations would be built in Britain and that Sellafield would continue to have a key role in the nuclear industry.
The nuclear industry in Britain had a future and that represented a "tremendous opportunity for Sellafield", Mr Blair said.
