Japan may protest to France over reactor-report
(Agencies)
Updated: 2005-05-06 21:48

Japan has not yet given up on a bid to host the world's first nuclear fusion reactor, officials said on Friday, and media reports said Tokyo may protest to France over remarks by President Jacques Chirac suggesting it was close to conceding.

Plans to build the $13 billion reactor have been stalled for months because of wrangling between France and Japan over where it should be located, but Chirac said this week that France would win the project.

"We will have it at Cadarache," he said in a television interview. But a senior Japanese official said no agreement had been made on the site of the ITER project.

"We are considering filing a protest with the French side through diplomatic channels," Kyodo news agency quoted Toichi Sakata, head of the research division at the Science Ministry, as saying.

"It's outrageous. We have never brought up proposals that suggested our intent to concede," Sakata said.

A foreign ministry spokesman added, "There is no truth to the idea that Japan will abandon its bid."

The six partners in the project -- the European Union, Japan, China, the United States, Russia and South Korea -- are evenly split over whether Japan or France should host the reactor.

ITER, whose name is the Latin word for "the way," is an international effort to mimic the way the sun produces energy and provide what supporters say could one day be an inexhaustible source of cheap energy.

Decades of research, however, have yet to produce a commercially viable fusion reactor.

Paris wants to build the plant at Cadarache, in the south of the country, while Tokyo has been pushing its site at Rokkasho in northern Japan.

Japanese media reports have said Japan might abandon its bid because it believed it would win construction work and jobs even if it did not host the project.

The two sides have agreed to reach a decision by a meeting of the Group of Eight industrial nations in July, and the EU remained upbeat on Friday.

"We should have an agreement and hopefully this should go in the right direction," Luxembourg's Deputy Prime Minister, Jean Asselborn, told reporters at a gathering of Asian and European foreign ministers in the Japanese city of Kyoto.

Luxembourg is the current holder of the EU presidency.

Asselborn said the topic did not come up in EU-Japan bilateral talks held on the sidelines of the Asia-Europe meeting but that progress had been made in recent discussions.

Japan's Finance Ministry is thought to be unenthusiastic about the project because of the huge cost involved.

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