JOHANNESBURG () -- Representatives of more than 30 countries signed a deal yesterday to build the world's most advanced nuclear fusion reactor, aimed at developing a clean, cheap and abundant energy source as the end of fossil fuels looms.
After months of wrangling, France edged out Japan last year to host the $12.8 billion international thermonuclear experimental reactor (Iter), which will be built in the south of France.
At a signing ceremony hosted by French President Jacques Chirac, representatives of the European Union (EU), the US, Japan, India, Russia, South Korea and China signed the Iter agreement in Paris, finalising the project after years of negotiations.
The idea was first proposed more than 20 years ago: it was agreed on by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985.
The Iter organisations say that if all goes well, the first commercial power from fusion reactors should be available in about 2045.
"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," Chirac told the meeting. "It (the Iter project) is a victory in the general interest of humanity," he said.
The reactor will aim to turn seawater into fuel by mimicking the way the sun produces energy.
Advocates of fusion power say that it is much safer and cleaner than the energy produced in today's fission reactors and has very low carbon emissions.
Its backers say that 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 one is built at all.
"We have really already come very far," Janez Potocnik, the EU's science and research commissioner, said. "We have to search for answers not only for the short and medium term, but also for the long term."
Unlike existing fission reactors, which release energy by splitting atoms, Iter would generate energy by combining atoms.
Despite decades of research, experimental fusion reactors have so far been unable to release more energy than they use.
In the lengthy negotiations over who would host the project, the EU and France made huge financial and industrial concessions to the Japanese, agreeing to pay for roughly half the EUR4.6 billion construction cost.
The countries involved, home to more than half the world's population, hailed it as a model of international co-operation to meet a global challenge.
