Saint-Paul-les-Durance, France - In 1985, then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and US president Ronald Reagan launched one of the unlikeliest ideas of the Cold War.
Under it, the Soviet Union would team up with United States and other rivals of the day to develop nuclear fusion: the same limitless energy source that powers the Sun.
Today, 30 years on, their dream is still a long and agonising way from reality.
Launched in 2006 after years of wrangling, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project is saddled with a reputation as a money pit.
It has been bedevilled by technical delays, labyrinthine decision-making and cost estimates that have soared from five billion euros ($5.56 billion) to around 15 billion. It may be another four years before it carries out its first experiment.
But, insists its new boss, a page has been turned.
"There has been a learning process," said Bernard Bigot, 65, a scientist and long-term chief of France's Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) who was named ITER's director general in March, replacing Japanese physicist Osamu Motojima.
"Today, there's a real awareness among all the partners that this project has to have a dimension of strong management to it."
ITER's job is to build a testbed to see if fusion, so far achieved in a handful of labs at great cost, is a realistic power source for the energy-hungry 21st Century.
Fusion entails forcing together the nuclei of light atomic elements in a super-heated plasma, held by powerful magnetic forces in a doughnut-shaped chamber called a tokamak, so that they make heavier elements and in so doing release energy.
The principle behind it is the opposite of nuclear fission -- the atom-splitting process behind nuclear bombs and power stations, which carries the risk of costly accidents, theft of radioactive material and dealing with dangerous long-term waste.
Despite the long haul, buildings are now emerging from the dry, yellowish soil near Aix-en-Provence, in the Mediterranean hinterland of southern France.
"The tokamak building is scheduled to be finished in 2018 and all 39 buildings by 2022," Laurent Schmieder, in charge of civil engineering, told journalists during a press tour of the site.
The tokamak -- a word derived from Russian -- by itself is an extraordinary undertaking: a 23,000-tonne lab, three times heavier than the Eiffel Tower.
"This is a project of unprecedented complexity... a real challenge," said Mario Merola, in charge of ITER's internal components division.
AFP
