Washington D.C. — Energy Ministers from China, the European Union, Japan, the Republic of Korea, the Russian Federation and the United States of America will meet in Washington on December 20th. The meeting, hosted by US Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham is expected to announce the selection of a site for the $12 billion (USD) experimental fusion reactor known as ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor). The candidate sites for the reactor are Cadarache, France and Rokkasho-mura, Japan.
On December 8th, Canada formally withdrew its bid to build the ITER reactor at the Darlington nuclear station in Clarington, Ontario. Canada also withdrew from participant status. In November, the European Union agreed to drop a bid proposal from Spain. At a preparatory meeting held in Vienna on December 4-5 in Vienna, it was agreed that the host country would have to pay 48% and 42% respectively for construction and operating costs on the project. Assuming that ITER will cost $12 billion (USD), split evenly between construction and operating costs, the host country will have to pay about $5.5 billion and each of the other five countries will have to pay about $1.3 billion (USD) each.
A briefing paper prepared by the Canadian government last May stressed that there will be a high risk of cost overruns for ITER. Environmentalists have condemned the international project as a waste of money, a bad direction for international energy policy, and not the "clean" energy that its supporters claim. The ITER reactor will use large amounts of radioactive tritium as fuel. Ingestion of tritium will increase the risk of cancer and birth defects in down-wind populations. The reactor will also produce 30,000 tonnes of radioactive waste deadly for at least 100 years.
"Congratulations to the Canadian government for refusing to waste billions of tax dollars on the ITER fusion reactor" said David H. Martin, Policy Advisor for the Sierra Club of Canada. "Fusion is a delusion. Even its supporters admit that a commercial reactor to generate electricity is at least 50 years away. The ITER reactor will not produce any electricity, and there is no guarantee that fusion will ever work. Fusion is not clean, and certainly not cheap."
Michael Mariotte, Executive Director of the Washington-based Nuclear Information & Resource Service (NIRS), said, "The ITER fusion reactor is a big-science boondoggle that has no energy payback. ITER will divert billions of dollars away from real green energy solutions to the world's climate change crisis."
For more information on ITER, please see: http://www.iter.ca
For comment, please contact:
David H. Martin, Policy Advisor, Sierra Club of Canada (Uxbridge, Ontario)
Cell phone: 647-224-3938 (Dec 19-20 only) Other times: 905-852-0571
Michael Mariotte
Executive Director, Nuclear Information & Resource Service (NIRS), Washington, DC
Tel: 301-270-6477