Russia lobbies China to build Cern competitor

Russia and China should consider creating an experimental facility to rival Cern's Large Hadron Collider and the Iter nuclear fusion project, a Russian official has said.

Speaking at a 2-day forum in Shanghai, China, on 25 October, the Russian presidential aide Andrei Fursenko said that creating a rival global project in the field of basic science could be a good way for the countries to boost their scientific progress.

Participation in Iter and Cern is expensive but provides significant scientific benefits, he said. Russia and China are both full members of the planned Iter fusion facility, based in France. Russia is an observer state of the Cern particle physics programme in Switzerland, and China is a member state with cooperative agreements.