Ministers representing the participants in negotiations on ITER construction - China, Europe, Japan, South Korea, the Russian Federation, and the United States of America - met in Washington today. Unfortunately, they were unable to reach agreement on the site for ITER, and agreed to meet again after the end of January 2004. They issued the following joint Communique:

"The Six Parties have reached a strong consensus on a number of points.

We have two excellent sites for ITER, so excellent in fact that we need further evaluation before making our decisions based on consensus.

We have agreed to provide remaining questions to the candidate host parties by the end of December for their answers by the end of January.

We will ask the ITER Team in conjunction with the ITER Parties to conduct a rapid exploration of the advantages of a broader project approach to fusion power. This work will be done on the same schedule.

With all this information, we plan to hold a follow-up Ministerial meeting to reach consensus as quickly as possible, likely to be in February."

A brief synopsis of the ITER project, public information materials and the rest of this web site, give further details.

Previous versions of this "What's New" page are also available:

• Cadarache selected a European candidate site - November 26th, 2003.
• Status of Negotiations - November 3rd, 2003.
• Korea joins ongoing negotiations - June 16th, 2003.
• Eighth Negotiators Meeting - February 20th, 2003.
• US announces joining ITER negotiations - February 3rd, 2003.
• China applies to join ITER - January 24th, 2003.
• Seventh Negotiators Meeting - December 16th, 2002.

As always, regular reports on the progress of ITER are given in the IAEA ITER Newsletter.

Further general news about fusion (with a US emphasis).

updated December 20th, 2003