Date published: 2006/05/24
The BBC says:
Seven international parties involved in an experimental nuclear fusion reactor project have initialled a 10bn-euro (£682m) agreement on the plan.
The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (Iter) will be the most expensive joint scientific project after the International Space Station.
Wednesday's agreement in Brussels gives the go-ahead for practical work on the project to start.
Nuclear fusion taps energy from reactions like those that heat the Sun.
The seven-party consortium, which includes the European Union, the US, Japan, China, Russia and others, agreed last year to build Iter in Cadarache, in the southern French region of Provence.
The parties say fusion will lead to a cheaper, safer, cleaner and endless energy resource in the years ahead.
...
Officials project that 10% to 20% of the world's energy could come from fusion by the end of the century. However environmental groups have criticised the project, saying there was no guarantee that the billions of euros would result in a commercially viable energy source."Investment in energy efficiency and renewables is the only reliable way to guarantee energy security," said Silvia Hermann, from Friends of the Earth Europe. "Giving billions of euros to a single nuclear project that is so far from reality is ill judged and irresponsible."
It's hard to know whose comments are sillier, the pro-fusion brigade or the so-called environmentalists. The former have promised endless riches for decades, and we are still decades away from that. And the latter are just up to their usual anti-technology ranting, with "big" being by definition bad and "small" being by definition good. Having a "cheap", "safe", "endless" energy resource would be a disaster for the so-called environmentalists since it would mean mankind could shape the environment even more than now. (Of course there is no such thing as a free lunch.) But investing billions of Euros in science and technology is rarely a waste of money in the long run. Nobody knows what the best energy technology will be in fifty years and it's best to try quite a few things. That the EU will be lead party in this technology is great news for Europe.
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