Time required to build ITER.

MOSCOW (AFP) - The six partners in the revolutionary ITER nuclear energy reactor agreed that France would host the multi-billion-dollar project, which is designed to emulate the power of the sun.

"Under this declaration, France is chosen as the site," said Antonia Mochane, spokeswoman for EU Science and Research Commissioner Janez Potocnik.

Japan earlier withdrew its bid to host the 10-billion-euro (12-billion-dollar) project, clearing the way for the site of Cadarache, in southern France.

Its backers hope that ITER will provide a cheap, clean and safe way to meet the world's future energy needs.

The project seeks to harness nuclear fusion, the same principle that powers the Sun and the stars, instead of splitting the atom -- the principle behind the atomic bomb and present-day nuclear plants.

The six partners in the project are the European Union,the United States, Russia, Japan, South Korea and China.

Why not just build the reactor in a neutral country? Australia sounds like a good bet :p

PARIS -- France was chosen Tuesday as the home for an experimental $13 billion nuclear fusion project scientists say will produce a boundless source of clean and cheap energy.

The threat of global warming has brought nuclear power -- currently available only through fission and long out of favor -- back to the forefront as a way of generating energy because it creates no so-called greenhouse gases, a cause of global warming.

Nuclear fission -- with heat as a byproduct -- occurs when heavy atoms such as those of uranium or plutonium are split. But the process leaves behind highly radioactive waste, and the reactors can catastrophically melt down.

Harnessing fusion as an energy source has long been a dream of physicists because it would be safer, cleaner and cheaper -- using naturally abundant hydrogen as an energy source.

The major source of energy right now, the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil, spews greenhouse gases into the Earth's atmosphere, trapping the sun's heat. Oil supplies are expected to begin running short in about 50 years.

As a replacement, fusion would produce much more energy than fission, while leaving behind small amounts of relatively harmless waste and posing no danger of a nuclear meltdown.

The project is expected to create 10,000 jobs and take about eight years to build. But fulfilling the long-term vision of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, as it is called, could take decades.

If all goes well with the experimental reactor, officials hope to set up a demonstration power plant in Cadarache around 2040. Officials project that as much as 20 percent of the world's energy could come from fusion by the century's end, said Raymond L. Orbach, the U.S. Department of Energy's office of science director.