Council will review ITER proposals on schedule

 

This effort was successfully accomplished in eight months through the coordinated efforts of the ITER Central Team, based in France, and the seven Domestic Agencies. The exercise itself was an example of the close collaboration that the Director-General has tried to instill as part of a new, success-oriented "project culture."

 

"We were able to keep our commitment to the Council at the needed level of quality and in the limited amount of time we set for ourselves," stated Director-General Bernard Bigot in his opening remarks. "To do so required the integrated scientific insight, engineering skills, and managerial competencies of every part of the organization. As a team, we performed a bottom-up assessment of the project. As a team, we found solutions to design challenges. As a team, we conducted an exhaustive and comprehensive Integrated Review. We have taken the first essential steps toward establishing a much-needed project culture."

 

The updated long-term schedule, and associated budget and staffing resources, will now be the object of an independent review mandated by the Council.

Until the Council completes its analysis, no definitive project schedule can be announced. "Of course we could not expect immediate approval of our proposals related to schedule, budget, and staffing," stressed the Director-General to the press after the meeting. "A fully qualified panel of experts will now look at the proposed schedule to verify the consistency and reliability, and also to see if there are areas that can be improved or accelerated. ITER is a funded through public investment and this level of scrutiny is absolutely to be expected."

 

In order to keep up project momentum while discussions are underway on the long-term schedule, the Council approved a schedule and milestones covering 2016 and 2017. The Council also approved a re-allocation of existing resources to meet these milestones, and the hiring of nearly 150 additional staff.

 

Project progress will be controlled and reported for the coming two years on the basis of 29 "high-level" milestones. Whether related to construction (i.e., the award of the Construction Management-as-Agent (CMa) contract in 2016 or the beginning of work on the B1 basement level of the Tokamak Complex), manufacturing (i.e., the winding of the first central solenoid module) or transport (i.e., the delivery of piping to the ITER site), the milestones are underpinned in the updated schedule by the many thousands of activities that make up progress to First Plasma.

 

"Milestones are a way of managing a project that is a large and as complex as ITER," says the Director-General. "Below the highest-level milestones are many different strata—approximately 250 milestones in the Level 1 schedule, 1,200 in the Level 2 schedule, and more than 150,000 sequences in the Level 3 schedule—each one a precisely defined task with an assigned owner. ITER is an industrial project now. My commitment to the Council is that the ITER Organization and the Domestic Agencies must never be the limiting step for suppliers to deliver. Instead, we will be catalysts for progress."

 

The seventeenth ITER Council was the last meeting for Chair Robert Iotti, from the US, who reaches the end of his two-year term on 31 December. All Council members expressed appreciation for his enormous personal engagement as Council Chair, as well as a long history of involvement with the project that dates back to the early engineering phase for ITER. "Bob became Council Chair at a challenging time—right after the Management Assessment in 2013 that had urged changes in both project management and governance—and he has worked tirelessly to see the recommendations implemented. He deserves great applause," said ITER Director-General Bernard Bigot after the meeting.

 

The Council elected Won Namkung, from Korea, as the next Chair of the ITER Council and Arun Srivastava, from India, as the next Vice-Chair.