France won its bid to build a €10-billion ($12.18 billion) experimental nuclear fusion reactor after more than a year of wrangling with Japan, the project's multinational partners said on Tuesday. Ministers from the partner countries signed an agreement at a meeting in Moscow making France the site for the ITER reactor, European Union spokeswoman Antonia Mochan told Reuters. The ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) project is backed by China, the EU, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States. It aims to mimic the way the sun produces energy, potentially providing an inexhaustible source of low-cost energy using seawater as fuel. Japan and France have battled over where the reactor should be built while other partners have clashed over funding. The EU, which had supported the French bid, wanted the reactor built in Cadarache, in France. Tokyo had sought to have it built in the northern Japanese village of Rokkasho.
