Canada's bid to host the international fusion project ITER has stalled and the country may now quit the experiment altogether.

In 2001, Canada offered a site at a nuclear facility in Clarington, Ontario, as a location for the US$5-billion prototype fusion reactor. But it now looks certain that its bid will be allowed to die, leaving Japan, France and Spain as the remaining contenders.

Canada's federal government and the provincial government of Ontario had been prepared to guarantee US$1.5 billion in loans to the other countries in the ITER partnership to help pay for the experiment. They had been unwilling to stump up hard money to pay for their own bid, however.

This left supporters of the project in Canada struggling to secure federal or provincial funds before December, when a location for ITER is to be chosen.

But these efforts ground to a halt after elections earlier this month, which resulted in a change of government in Ontario, says Murray Stewart, who heads ITER Canada, the non-profit entity running the Canadian bid. Stewart says that he is launching a last-minute blitz to sell ITER to newly elected lawmakers, but the prospect of mobilizing large amounts of funding looks slim.

“I have not seen any evidence that the federal government is anxious to participate,” says University of Toronto president Robert Birgeneau, who organized a government-mandated study on ITER last year.

Canada has been part of the ITER design project since 1992. But if it doesn't host the reactor, it might withdraw from ITER entirely, says David Baldwin, who heads the fusion group at nuclear-energy company General Atomics in San Diego. “There is no strong fusion community in Canada,” Baldwin says, adding that such a withdrawal is unlikely to damage the project. “I don't see a threat of other pull-outs,” he says.