NIZHNY NOVGOROD, April 18 (RIA Novosti) - The world's first thermonuclear power plant could be built by 2030, the head of Russia's Kurchatov Nuclear Research Center said Wednesday.

Yevgeny Velikhov told a press conference after receiving the 2006 Global Energy prize along with Japanese researcher Masaji Yoshikawa and French scientist Robert Aymar that the experience of building an international thermonuclear reactor in France would be used to design a thermonuclear power plant.

Velikhov and his colleagues were given the award for developing the fundamentals underpinning the international thermonuclear power reactor known as the ITER project in the southern French town of Cadarache. It was devised to prove that a thermonuclear power plant was possible.

The concept emerged when the Soviet Union suggested that the four most advanced parties in the study of thermonuclear reactions - the U.S.S.R., the U.S., Europe and Japan - create a so-called "tokamak" reactor, a doughnut-shaped chamber to confine incandescent plasma that no material can withstand in a magnetic field. The thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen isotopes, deuterium and tritium, proceeds in the plasma.

The world's first tokamak was produced in Moscow in 1955, and research was carried out in the Soviet Union alone for the next 15 years.

The more than $12 billion ITER project, which involves Russia, the United States, Japan, China, South Korea and the European Union, was ready for implementation long ago, but the parties could not reach a compromise on the site for the construction. The EU had the support of Russia and China to build the reactor. Japan had the backing of the U.S. and South Korea to construct it in Rokkasho in the north of the country.

France finally beat out Japan in its bid to host an experimental nuclear fusion reactor expected to produce clean and safe energy.