The 21st IAEA Fusion Energy Conference will be held from October
16 to 21 in Chengdu, capital of southwest China's Sichuan Province,
local government sources announced on Tuesday.
It will be the first time a developing nation has hosted an IAEA
fusion energy conference. A total of 830 scientists from China and
abroad will attend the six-day event.
The meeting will be sponsored by the International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA), and local supporters include the China National
Atomic Energy Agency, the city government of Chengdu and China
Nuclear Industrial Group.
According to He Huazhang, vice mayor of Chengdu, the venue is
determined at the 20th IAEA Fusion Energy Conference held in 2004.
India and the United States were also candidates to host the
event.
He said China was chosen to host the coming conference because
its nuclear research institutes had achieved some outstanding
experimental results in the field of controlled nuclear fusion.
The Southwestern Research Institute of Physics, based in
Chengdu, is China's largest institute specializing in controlled
nuclear fusion and plasma physics research. It has built three
nuclear fusion research devices, nicknamed "artificial sun."
Another major facility is EAST (Experimental Advanced
Superconducting Tokamak) located at the Institute of Plasma Physics
under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Hefei, capital of
east China's Anhui Province. It is said to be the first advanced
full superconducting experimental Tokamak in the world and has
recently undergone a successful test.
Controlled nuclear fusion, which replicates the energy
generating process of the sun, is seen as an efficient source of
unlimited, clean energy to offset the dearth of fossil fuels such
as oil and coal.
Scientists believe that deuterium can be extracted from the sea
and enormous amounts of energy obtained from a deuterium-tritium
fusion reaction at a massive temperature of 100 million degrees
Celsius. After nuclear fusion, the deuterium extracted from one
liter of seawater would produce energy equivalent to 300 liters of
gasoline.
If the nuclear fusion technology is commercialized, it could
provide energy for mankind for more than 100 million years,
scientists believe.
(Xinhua News Agency October 11, 2006)
