In charge of the "crucial factor"

If you want to conduct an interview with Neil Mitchell you had better be fit; you will have to bring your jogging shoes to follow him pacing through the corridors. Or, you had better have a good reason for making him sit down. The Head of the ITER Magnets Division is a cross country runner on weekends. Weekdays, he is either coming in from a mission or heading out on another: observing conductor tests in Switzerland, strand manufacturing in Japan, or celebrating the foundation stone ceremony for the new jacketing facility in China.

Neil Mitchell has been involved in fusion research and the early stages of the ITER Project for two decades. He came to Cadarache for the first time in 1985 when the then Head of Tore Supra, Robert Aymar, showed the young visiting engineer from "Angleterre" around the Tore Supra magnet system that was under construction.

With an engineering PhD in turbomachinery and industrial experience in gas turbine construction, Neil had come into contact with fusion research at the JET project in Culham in 1981. At that time, the RFX project—a tokamak with a radius of 2 m and a plasma current of 2 MA—was in the planning stages with the financial and scientific support of Los Alamos (New Mexico), US and Padova in Italy. The project was finally reassigned to Italy in 1984. Neil remembers: "The construction of JET sucked in all the money and squeezed the UKAEA's domestic program."

In 1983 Neil irrevocably got caught in the fusion "NET." NET stood for the Next European Torus, an international project based in Garching, Germany. Its objective was to produce a plasma with parameters relevant for a fusion reactor, and in this way was one of the early steps on the way to ITER. Neil was among the first three people to arrive in Garching, charged to deal not only with the magnet issues, but also to look at the vacuum vessel and blankets. "It soon seemed to me that the crucial factor in achieving fusion was the magnets, so I gradually specialized in this area." Among the successes credited to the NET team was the development of cable-in-conduit conductors and the use of niobium-tin (Nb3Sn) combined with high voltage coil insulation instead of the superfluid baths that were used in Tore Supra.

The contours of Neil's further career were thus defined. After ten years in Garching, including contributing to the first world wide fusion collaboration, INTOR, and participating in the ITER Conceptual Design Activities (starting in 1988), Neil moved to Naka, Japan, in 1993 as head of the conductor section. Here, as his family embarked on yet a different cultural experience, he oversaw the conductor fabrication and testing of the central solenoid model coil project. He became the head of ITER magnets after the retirement of Michel Huguet, and was the last head of the Naka site, closing the ITER activity there before moving to Cadarache in 2006.