Technical Integration Group meets 2nd time

At its last meeting in Mito, Japan, in June this year, the ITER Council had asked its Management Advisory Committee (MAC) to "reconvene the subgroup on ITER Technical Integration to review the progress in the ITER Organization approach to integration of systems, components and structures into final design and construction, and advise the ITER Organization as necessary."

According to this request, the chairman of this Technical Integration subgroup, Vladimir Vlasenkov, called in a first meeting in May this year which was followed by another meeting this week in the ITER Headquarters in Cadarache. Members of this group are Bharat Kumar Manda from India, Carl Strawbridge and Charles Neumeyer from the US, Makoto Sugimoto from Japan, Tom Todd on behalf of Europe, and Young Suk Hur from Korea. As some of the issues discussed are of concern both to the MAC and the Science and Technology Advisory Committee, the STAC Members Michael Pick (EU), Qingquan Yu (China), Taro Matsumoto (Japan) and Erol Oktay from the US were invited to participate.

The outcome of this three-day review will be handed over to the MAC meeting next week. In a first summary Vladimir Vlasenkov and Carl Strawbridge acknowledged "the extensive amount of work that has been done since the last meeting."