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a new international fusion reactor

IF AVANT-GARDE cuisine is any guide, Japanese-French fusion does not work all that well. And the interminable discussions over the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) suggest that what is true of cooking is true of physics. Japan and France (along with much of the rest of Europe, under the banner of an organisation called Euratom) are supposed to be joining America, China, Russia and South Korea in a project called ITER, which aims to build a fusion reactor.

Such a reactor would generate power by merging the nuclei of hydrogen atoms, and thus liberating the so-called binding energy whose absence, paradoxically, helps to hold complicated atomic nuclei together. This is a process similar to the one that powers the sun. Moreover, unlike previous attempts to do so, ITER would produce more energy than it consumed in getting the hydrogen nuclei hot enough to fuse in the first place.

The current imbroglio is over who gets the reactor, and with it the economic boost of a multibillion-dollar construction project. The two sites remaining in the competition are Cadarache in France and Rokkasho in Japan.

Read the article @ Economist.com | Fusion power