News / Brèves Back to previous selection / Retour à la sélection précédente ITER Partners Explain and Promote Fusion Development at International Energy Conference 31 October 2013 (LPAC)—For the first time in the 89-year history of the World Energy Congress, fusion energy was included on the formal agenda as part of the discussion of energy options for the future. The leadership of ITER (the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) which is under construction in France, and other participants, used the opportunity to present a visionary and urgent view of the need for fusion. The venue of the Congress was held in Daegu, Korea, and about 6,000 delegates from 140 nations attended. On a fusion panel the second day of the Congress, on October 14, Dr. G.S. Lee, former head of South Korea’s National Fusion Research Institute, and a leading member of the ITER project, pointed out that "What makes fusion completely different it that it’s a knowledge-based, not a resource-based, energy." This helps to explain why especially South Korea and China, both partners in ITER, are aggressively supporting also their own domestic fusion programs. ITER Director General Osamu Motojima, with a bit of jocularity, compared ITER’s quest with President Kennedy’s lunar program: "Then, people could look at the Moon and dream of walking, which created massive support for Apollo. The Sun is another dream, but you can’t look at it for more than a couple of seconds," he said. But there is a Moon-fusion connection, he pointed out, because "helium-3 was discovered in great quantity in the rocks that were brought back from the Moon. And helium-3 is the future fuel of fusion." Minh Quang Tran, director-general of the Centre for Plasma Physics at the Ecole Polytechnique in Lausanne, Switzerland, took issue with Director Motojima’s timetable, to wait until ITER is a success, around 2030, and only then plan for the next step. Tran said simply: "We have the talent and the resources. What we need now is the political commitment, but in parallel, not sequentially." In the exhibit hall at the Congress, the ITER stand, manned by Korean, Indian, Japanese, and Russian fusion experts, explained mock-ups of ITER and the Korean KStar tokamaks, and some of the components that are starting to be delivered to ITER in France. [MGF]