FRANCE: Science's quest to find a cheap and inexhaustible way to meet global energy needs took a major step forward yesterday when a 30-nation consortium chose to build the world's first nuclear fusion reactor in France.
After months of wrangling, France defeated a bid from Japan and signed a deal to site the €10 billion ($12.18 billion) experimental reactor in Cadarache, near Marseille.
The project will seek to turn seawater into fuel by mimicking the way the sun produces energy.
"We are making scientific history," Janez Potocnik, the EU's Science and Research Commissioner, told a news conference in Moscow, where the multinational partners in the ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) project met.
A nuclear fusion power station is the "Holy Grail" for scientists trying to find a viable alternative to the world's depleting stocks of oil and gas. Crude this week reached a record price of $60.95 a barrel in some trading and a summit of the G8 industrial nations next week is to discuss climate change, widely blamed on burning fossil fuels for energy.
Unlike existing fission reactors, which release energy by splitting atoms apart, ITER would generate energy by combining them.