Marseille: The United States will suspend for this year its financial participation in an international nuclear fusion project, that includes India, for budgetary reasons, project spokesman Neil Calder said today.

"This is a very worrying situation, but we cannot come to the conclusion that the United States will quit ITER," said Calder, of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project, confirming a report first published in France's Le Figaro daily.

The move came after the US scientific community discovered late December that its research budget had been cut by 400 million dollars, rather than increasing as expected, Calder said. Roughly 160 million of that amount was earmarked for 2008 for the France-based ITER project, expected to be up and running by 2016.

"It s not a cash contribution that has been withdrawn from the project, but equipment that the Americans were to have constructed that will be delayed," he said.

The United States is expected to contribute 9 per cent of the 10-billion dollar project shared among Europe, China, Russia, Japan, South Korea and India. The European Union is to contribute the lion s share, or 46 per cent of the total. The project aims to research a clean and limitless alternative to dwindling fossil fuel reserves by testing nuclear fusion technologies.

Instead of splitting the atom the principle behind current nuclear plants the project seeks to harness nuclear fusion: the power of the sun and the stars achieved by fusing together atomic nuclei.

Source : PTI