Press review on the annoucement of the siting of ITER

Wednesday, 29 June 2005

UK/ Financial Times
FT.com site : France to host nuclear fusion project.
28 juin 2005 Financial Times (FT.Com)
French President Jacques Chirac hailed a deal on Tuesday for France to host a ?10bn ($12.18 bn) experimental nuclear fusion reactor and thanked Japan, its rival for the site, for paving the way to a compromise.

US/ The New York Times
France Will Get Fusion Reactor To Seek a Future Energy Source
By CRAIG S. SMITH; Kenneth Chang contributed reporting from New York for this article., 29 juin 2005, The New York Times
PARIS, June 28 -- An international consortium announced Tuesday that France would be the site of the world's first large-scale, sustainable nuclear fusion reactor, an estimated $10 billion project that many scientists see as crucial to solving the world's future energy needs.

NucNet
EU And Japan’s ‘Privileged Partnership’ Outlined In ITER Accord
The European Commission (EC) has announced details of the agreement reached earlier today that will see the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project based at the EU candidate site of Cadarache, France (see also News Alert No. 2, 28th June 2005).

Japan/ Daily Yomiuri
EDITORIAL / Japan has key role in ITER project
29 juin 2005, Daily Yomiuri
The dispute over which nation should host the world's first nuclear fusion reactor has been settled after a contest lasting several years between Japan and the European Union for the position.

FT.com site : France to host nuclear fusion project.

FT staff and Reuters
243 mots
28 juin 2005
Financial Times (FT.Com)
(c) 2005 The Financial Times Limited. All rights reserved

French President Jacques Chirac hailed a deal on Tuesday for France to host a ?10bn ($12.18 bn) experimental nuclear fusion reactor and thanked Japan, its rival for the site, for paving the way to a compromise.

"It is a big success for France, for Europe and for all the partners of Iter," Mr Chirac said in a statement after agreement was reached in Moscow by officials from the European Union, Russia, China, the United States, Japan, and South Korea.

Under the accord, the reactor known as Iter (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) will be built at Cadarache, near Marseille in southern France, where up to 10,000 jobs could be created.

Iter, supposedly a showcase of European-Japanese co-operation, had been held up for more than 18 months because of a bitter fight over national prestige, jobs and investment.

The project would be the first large-scale demonstration of nuclear fusion, the reaction that powers the sun. It is due to start operating in 2014 and run for about 20 years.

The world's main scientific and industrial powers were split, with the US and South Korea backing Japan and Russia and China supporting the EU.
The EU is funding half the ?10bn ($12bn, GBP7bn) project, while the other five backers are each paying 10 per cent of the costs.

Chirac is scheduled to visit Cadarache on Thursday.

top

France Will Get Fusion Reactor To Seek a Future Energy Source

By CRAIG S. SMITH; Kenneth Chang contributed reporting from New York for this article.
1,479 mots
29 juin 2005
The New York Times
Late Edition - Final
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved.

PARIS, June 28 - An international consortium announced Tuesday that France would be the site of the world's first large-scale, sustainable nuclear fusion reactor, an estimated $10 billion project that many scientists see as crucial to solving the world's future energy needs.

''It is a great success for France, for Europe and for all the partners in ITER,'' President Jacques Chirac said in a statement released after the six-member consortium of the United States, Russia, China, Japan, South Korea and the European Union chose the country as the site for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor.

Japan, which had lobbied hard for the project, dropped out of the bidding in the last few days and ceded to France. The consortium agreed in Moscow to build the project at Cadarache in southern France.

Nuclear fusion is the process by which atomic nuclei are forced together, releasing huge amounts of energy, as with the sun or a hydrogen bomb. The process has long been studied as a potential energy source that would be far cleaner than burning fossil fuels or even nuclear fission, which is used in nuclear reactors today but produces dangerous radioactive waste.

While the physics of nuclear fusion have long been understood, the engineering required to control the process remains difficult.

The logistics of coordinating construction in a six-member consortium has presented an even bigger challenge. The project was started in 1988 but bogged down in bickering over where the reactor's design team would be based. A compromise split the team between Japan, Germany and the United States, but the consortium struggled over where the reactor would be built.

Canada, Spain, France and Japan were originally in contention for the reactor site, but a December 2003 ministerial meeting to pick a winner ended in a deadlock, with the United States, Japan and South Korea backing the Japanese site and the other three consortium members pushing for the site in France.

Recently, Japan agreed to relinquish its bid in return for the consortium's commitment to build a $1 billion materials testing center there.

The consortium also promised that any subsequent fusion reactor built by the consortium would be built in Japan. It is a significant concession, because the first reactor is only a demonstration plant meant to prove that fusion can be harnessed as an economically viable energy source. A second reactor would probably be a prototype meant for commercial power generation.

With the agreement, the consortium can now proceed with the drafting of a deal on the construction and operation of the reactor. ITER officials said they hoped that the accord would be signed by the end of the year, allowing work on the reactor to begin next year and ground to be broken at the Cadarache site in 2008. Current plans foresee the reactor operating in 2016.

Construction of the reactor is estimated to cost $5 billion, with its operation costing another estimated $5 billion over 20 years, according to ITER. The host country is expected to cover half of those costs, with the other five partners each paying 10 percent. Those numbers are based on current dollars, however, meaning the actual cost of the reactor will be much higher by the time it is completed.

Many experts also predict that construction could take much longer than now foreseen given the difficulty of coordinating multiple suppliers of costly and highly technical components in many countries. The agreement leaves open the possibility that still more countries may take part in the project. India, for example, has expressed interest.

The final agreement is expected to include provisions that would require consortium members that cause delays to pay compensation.

The fusion project has stirred controversy since it was first proposed in the 1980's, with many scientists arguing that such ''big science'' will rob financing from the ''little science'' of individual researchers who have often produced the world's most striking scientific breakthroughs.

But criticism has been drowned out by the growing recognition of fusion's potential as a solution to the world's looming energy crisis.

''We all know oil and gas depletion will start in 2030 or 2035,'' said Peter Haug, secretary general of the European Nuclear Society.

He said most experts agreed that because of technical difficulties, renewable energy sources like wind or solar power would never provide more than 15 or 20 percent of the world's energy needs. There is enough coal in the earth to keep the world running for centuries, but at an unacceptable environmental cost. As oil and gas fields peter out, Mr. Haug and others say, the world will be forced to turn to nuclear energy.

''We don't think fusion will remove fission from the production scheme,'' Mr. Haug said. ''But it will probably be used along with fission because of the growing energy needs of man.''

Still, few scientists expect a fusion reactor to generate commercially viable electricity before mid-century, if by then.

In principle, using fusion to produce energy is easy: take hydrogen atoms and press them together to form helium. The helium is a bit lighter than its constituent hydrogen pieces, and by Einstein's E=mc² equation, that tiny change in mass results in a large release of energy.

At the center of the sun, where temperatures reach nearly 30 million degrees Fahrenheit and hydrogen atoms are pushed together at ultra-high pressures, fusion generates light and heat. But turning fusion into a viable source of energy requires figuring out how to recreate on Earth the conditions at the sun's heart.

Instead of ordinary hydrogen, fusion reactors use heavier versions, known as deuterium and tritium, that fuse together more easily. Experimental fusion reactors have been able to heat gases to temperatures of hundreds of millions of degrees. The harder task, however, is confining the hot gas.

ITER follows the same approach used by most large-scale fusion experiments since the 1970's, using doughnut-shaped magnetic fields to confine the gas, but it will be the first large enough to explore how well fusion reactions can be sustained.

In order to succeed, the ITER project must demonstrate that it can create a fuel cycle in the reactor that will produce excess tritium, the reactor's fuel, from a ''blanket'' of lithium lining the reactor chamber. As neutrons thrown off from the fusion reaction strike lithium atoms, they produce tritium. But in order for the reactor to be viable, consortium officials say, the reactor must produce more tritium than it consumes.

Even fusion proponents concede that the process is decades away from practical use. A timeline published on ITER's Web site foresees a larger demonstration project that would begin operating around 2030. A commercial fusion reactor would follow around 2050.

ITER's interim leader, Yasuo Shimomura, said the project's next step would be to appoint a director general who could start the complicated procurement process.

The consortium has already spent $700 million on scale models of the reactor's major components, and ''in this sense, there is no fundamental technical problem,'' Dr. Shimomura said in a phone call from ITER's offices in Garching, Germany. ''But the machine is very complicated, and the procurement will be done between six parties, and this is not a small experimental device, it is a real nuclear device, so quality control will be very important.''

In the meantime, the fusion project means money for the industries and scientific sectors contributing to it. Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin of France said it would create 4,000 jobs and bolster research and development there.

''It's brings us great joy and great pride,'' said Pascale Amenc Antoni, director of the French Atomic Energy Commission's Cadarache Center, where the reactor will be built. She said it also recognized the work the center has already carried out at its nuclear fusion research facility.

Photo: The model of the site of the International Thermonculear Experimental Reactor (ITER) that is to be built at Cadarache in southern France. (Photo by Claude Paris/Associated Press)(pg. A10)

Chart: ''Comparing Fuels''

As a source of energy, fusion, if a viable plant can be built, would have many advantages over coal and nuclear fission power plants.

DAILY FUEL CONSUMPTION AND WASTE PRODUCTION FOR 1,000 MEGAWATTS

FUEL

COAL PLANT: 9,000 tons coal

NUCLEAR FISSION PLANT: 147 lbs. uranium

NUCLEAR FUSION PLANT: 1 lb. deuterium -- 1.5 lbs. tritium

WASTE

COAL PLANT: 30,000 tons carbon dioxide -- 600 tons sulfur dioxide -- 80 tons nitric oxide

NUCLEAR FISSION PLANT: 6.6 lbs. highly radioactive material

NUCLEAR FUSION PLANT: 4.0 lbs. helium

top

EU And Japan’s ‘Privileged Partnership’ Outlined In ITER Accord

The European Commission (EC) has announced details of the agreement reached earlier today that will see the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project based at the EU candidate site of Cadarache, France (see also News Alert No. 2, 28th June 2005).

Although Japan lost its bid to site ITER at its candidate site, in Rokkasho, the EU and Japan will cooperate in what the EU said will be a “privileged partnership”. Highlights of the agreement* are:

Japan will provide high-tech components corresponding to 20% of the total procurements for ITER construction;
The EU will also make contributions to other (so-called Broader Approach) projects in cash and in kind;
The EU will support a “suitable Japanese candidate” as director-general of the planned ITER organisation and Japan will have the right to supply “more than a proportional share” of the organisation’s staff;
Some ITER headquarters functions, including meetings of the ITER council, could be based in Japan;
If, at a later phase of the project, there is an international agreement to build a demonstration reactor, the EU would support Japan’s candidacy to host it;
For the EU, a new organisation will be established in Spain through which contributions (in cash and in kind) will be provided to the ITER organisation.

The ITER project involves the construction of an experimental fusion reactor to assess the feasibility of fusion energy as an energy source and, consequently, the feasibility of constructing a subsequent demonstration reactor – possibly with commercial fusion reactors to follow.

ITER spokesman Bill Spears described the project as “a key step between physics and implementation”. He told NucNet that if ITER proves viable, many countries may want to build their own demonstration reactor. Mr Spears said that if, as the EU indicated, there is an international agreement to build such a unit, Japan would likely host it.

Meanwhile, the six ITER parties will also share the estimated 4.57 billion euro (EUR) construction cost at Cadarache, with the EU and France contributing 50% and the other parties 10% each. Operation costs are expected to total about another EUR 5 billion. The total cost will be spread over 30 years – 10 years for construction and 20 years of operation.

The director-general of Foratom, the trade association of the European nuclear industry, Dr Peter Haug, said: “This will provide a major boost for the European nuclear energy industry and is well-earned recognition of its excellent research credentials.”

Dr Haug, who is also secretary-general of the European Nuclear Society, added that the decision “shows that nuclear energy remains an important energy option and sends out a positive signal that the nuclear industry offers talented young people the opportunity to pursue a challenging and worthwhile career in a sector that is at the cutting edge of modern technology”.

Of the six ITER parties, the EU, Russia and China had favoured basing the project at Cadarache while Japan, the US and South Korea had favoured Rokkasho (see News in Brief No. 46, 21st April 2005).

Negotiations had been deadlocked over the siting since December 2003, preventing progress on technical aspects of the project. But in early 2005 the EU insisted that, if necessary, it could build the ITER reactor in France even without the support of the other parties. In April 2005 the EU and Japan agreed to accelerate talks to reach an agreement (see News in Brief No. 46, 21st April 2005).

In announcing today’s decision at a meeting of the six parties in Moscow, the EC said: “This agreement heralds the end of a deadlock between two alternative sites for the reactor and is an important milestone in the move towards establishing fusion as a sustainable source of energy production.

“Now that this issue has been resolved, the technical work can be carried out to finalise the agreement. It is hoped that it will be possible for all parties to initial the text of the agreement by the end of this year, thereby allowing for the start of construction by the end of 2005.”

*‘ITER and fusion energy research – your questions answered’, is available on the EC’s website (http://europa.eu.int) together with links to other information about the project.

Source: NucNet / EC
Editor: Daniel MacIsaac

top

EDITORIAL / Japan has key role in ITER project

The dispute over which nation should host the world's first nuclear fusion reactor has been settled after a contest lasting several years between Japan and the European Union for the position.

During a ministerial meeting in Moscow on Tuesday, the EU and five nations agreed that the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor would be built in Cadarache, southern France.

A nuclear fusion reactor could serve as an artificial sun on the Earth. Such a plant is expected to produce inexhaustible energy. However, there still are a number of technical problems to be surmounted in an attempt to use a fusion reactor for practical purposes. Given this, it is essential to study how to clear these hurdles, using the ITER project as a basis for achieving the goal.

The ITER would be a gigantic facility. The main part of its reactor would be comparable to the Great Buddha of Nara in size. The facility also would house a mass of precision machines used to control the colossal amount of energy it would generate.

It will take 10 years to build the reactor and cost about 1.3 trillion yen to construct and operate the facility before it is dismantled 35 years later.

If they combine their expertise and financial contributions, the participants in the project will be able to develop research on how to solve related technical problems.

Japan and the EU should closely cooperate with the other participants--the United States, Russia, China and South Korea--to develop the project. They should work out the details of the project as soon as possible, to break ground for the reactor.

===

Many benefits on offer

Despite its concession to the EU in the dispute over the location of the reactor, Japan has gained assurances from the other ITER participants that it will reap rich benefits from the project.

The EU will pay half of the 500 billion yen bill for the ITER's construction. Japan and the other four nations will shoulder 10 percent of the remaining costs each. This country also will receive 20 percent of orders for necessary construction work, obtaining a portion of the share allotted to the EU. All this will provide Japan with an opportunity to gain practical experience in building a nuclear fusion reactor.

The envisaged ITER Organization will be headed by a Japanese, and 20-30 percent of the employees at the international institution also will be Japanese.

Some facilities related to the ITER project also will be built in Japan, including a research laboratory that will receive data on the operation of the reactor through a high-speed communications network and analyze the reactor's condition. The EU will cover half of the costs to be incurred by building such facilities in this nation.

Japan has a greater share of work to do in operating the ITER than the other nations. This means that Japan must shoulder a greater responsibility for the project. The government must work with the EU to ensure that cooperation among all ITER participants is maintained during the project.

===

Smooth cooperation vital

The U.S. administration still has not gained consent from the Congress concerning the United States' share of the costs of the ITER project. The United States quit the ITER project at one point because of objections to it from Congress. It is unclear whether the United States will be willing to cooperate with the other ITER participants.

Meanwhile, China and South Korea reportedly are dissatisfied with the preferential arrangements awarded to Japan despite the fact that the three nations will pay the same share of the ITER costs.

For years, Japan has been in the forefront of nuclear fusion research. By taking advantage of its accumulated expertise, this nation should contribute to the project in the form of technical and personnel assistance. This is essential to gain support from the other ITER participants for Japan's position in the project.

To make up for losses suffered by giving up its bid to host the ITER in Rokkashomura, Aomori Prefecture, the government should also take necessary steps at home. For years, the northeastern village has cooperated with the central government in promoting this nation's nuclear energy program. With this in mind, the government should reward Rokkashomura for its years of cooperation, for instance, by making the village home to facilities related to the ITER project.

(From The Yomiuri Shimbun, June 29)

top

reflections

core activities

info pool

contact

Sitemap

spotlights