June 30, 2005

Decision made during closed-door meeting

French get fusion reactor contract

By Grant Cameron

features editor

ITER is going to France.

Antonia Mochan, spokeswoman for the European Union’s science and research committee, said Tuesday that the decision was made in Moscow at a closed-door meeting of the consortium backing the project.

The project was once courted by Canada and supported by the Provincial Building and Construction Trades Council of Ontario.

A Canadian committee had proposed that the project be built on the shore of Lake Ontario in the Municipality of Clarington, between St. Mary’s Cement and the Darlington Nuclear Generating Station.

The project would have created hundreds of jobs for the skilled trades.

However, the federal government failed to cough up $2.3 billion over 30 years for the project and the bid failed.

ITER, which stands for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, is an ambitious venture to develop fusion as a new source of energy.

Fusion is the process that occurs in the sun when tiny amounts of matter are brought together to release huge amounts of energy.

Scientists hope that the process can wean the world off pollution-producing fossil fuels. Nuclear fusion produces no greenhouse gas emissions and only low levels of radioactive waste.

The project is funded by a consortium comprised of Japan, the United States, South Korea, Russia, China and the European Union, but the six parties had been divided over where to put the test reactor.

Competition was intense. At stake are billions of dollars worth of research funding, construction and engineering contracts, and the creation of up to 100,000 new jobs, according to estimates cited by Dow Jones NewsWires.

Japan, the United States and South Korea wanted the facility built at Rokkasho in northern Japan. Russia, China and the European Union wanted it at Cadarache, in southern France.

The European Union site in France had been seen as the front-runner, and Japanese newspaper reports had said Tokyo was prepared to give up hosting the $13 billion (US) ITER project in return for a bigger research and operations role in the project.

Some scientists have warned that both sites are in seismically active zones and could be prone to earth tremors.

With files from The Associated Press

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