Science's quest to find a cheap and inexhaustible way to meet global energy needs took a major step forward today when a 30-nation consortium chose France to host the world's first nuclear fusion reactor.
After months of wrangling, France defeated a bid from Japan and signed a deal to site the €10-billion-experimental reactor in Cadarache, near Marseille.
The project will seek to turn seawater into fuel by mimicking the way the sun produces energy.
Its backers say it would be cleaner than existing nuclear reactors, but critics argue it could be at least 50 years before a commercially viable reactor is built, if at all.
“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 were meeting.
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 Group of Eight industrial nations next week is to discuss climate change, widely blamed on burning fossil fuels for energy.