Representatives of more than 30 countries, including India, today signed a deal to build the world’s most advanced nuclear fusion reactor, aimed at developing a clean, cheap and abundant energy source as the end of fossil fuels looms.

After months of wrangling, France edged out Japan last year to host the 10-billion-euro ($12.8-billion) International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), which will be built at Cadarache, near the southern city of Marseille.

At a signing ceremony hosted by French President Jacques Chirac, representatives of the European Union, the US, Japan, India, Russia, South Korea and China signed the ITER agreement in the presidential Elysee Palace in Paris, finalizing the project after years of negotiations.

“If nothing changes, humanity will have consumed, in 200 years, most of the fossil fuel resources accumulated over hundreds of millions of years, provoking, at the same time, a veritable climate calamity,” Chirac told the meeting. “It (the ITER project) is a victory in the general interest of humanity,” he added.

The ITER will aim to turn seawater into fuel by mimicking the way the sun produces energy. Its backers say that would be cleaner than existing reactors.

-Francois Murphy