Click here for more images. It's like driving a car onto a ferry. But it takes much, much longer and it's incomparably more delicate and complicated. On Friday 28 March, on a remote wharf at the southwest end of the Fos-sur-Mer industrial harbour near Marseille, the loading of the ITER mockup convoy onto a barge took more than eight hours. Progress was measured millimetre by millimetre as the weight of the 800-tonne monster trailer was gradually transferred from the solid ground to the water-borne combination of barge and pontoon. Axle line after axle line (and there are 22 double pairs of them!) the trailer and its dummy load of stacked concrete blocks were slowly driven onto the pontoon as electronic calculators adjusted the barge's ballast in real-time. Personnel from ITER logistics provider DAHER and the Compagnie Fluviale de Transport monitored every millimetre of progress as the trailer crossed onto the barge. Each time an axle line transferred its load from the ground to the barge a long pause (5-20 minutes) ensued. Balance was checked and calculators activated the filling and emptying of the ballast tanks to compensate the imperceptible, but potentially dangerous, pitching, tossing and rolling of the barge. By the time the sun had set on the wharf, the trailer had progressed approximately 40 metres and its load had been safely transferred to the barge. "This last phase is the most delicate," explained Alain Spatafora, the maritime expert commissioned by the ITER Organization and logistics provider DAHER, and Bernard Bon, DAHER head of convoy. "The centre of gravity of the trailer must now be perfectly aligned with the centre of buoyancy of the barge." The last phase was the most delicate. The centre of gravity of the 800-tonne load must be perfectly aligned with the centre of buoyancy of the barge.¶ On board, as bubble levels were laid on the deck to verify the perfect horizontality of the barge, the crew was busy making the last adjustments. Captains and sailors of the Compagnie Fluviale de Transports (CFT) are used to transporting exceptionally heavy loads, but at 800 tonnes this one exceeded anything they had experienced. The night was falling when, in conformity with port regulations, Marseille harbour stevedores climbed on board to lash down the trailer and its load, marking the end of the operation. The barge spent the weekend in protected docking (a strong north wind was expected during the night) and on Monday afternoon, weather permitting, it is expected to leave Fos, navigate into the narrow Caronte Canal through the town of Martigues and cross the inland sea Étang de Berre. The trailer will then be unloaded at Port-de-la-Pointe on the north-western shore of the Étang, before commencing its slow progression towards the ITER site where it is expected at around 6:00 a.m. on Friday 4 April. Click here for more images.

Concrete pouring for the basemat of the Tritium Building began on Wednesday 19 March. Close to 1,000 cubic meters of concrete were employed in filling a 638 square-metre plot (P14) in the north-east corner of the Tokamak Pit.   As for the Diagnostics Building basemat, the section of the slab that will support the Tritium Building will be poured in three separate segments. The next two, plots 12 and 15, are scheduled for pouring in April.   In the central area of the Tokamak Pit, where a combination of orthogonal and orthodradial rebar create a particularly tight and complex pattern, pouring should begin in late July and be completed in early October.

The first Asian ITER Business Forum (IBF Korea/14) will take place in Seoul, Korea, from 1 to 4 July 2014.   This event aims to develop industrial partnerships and business relations between industries involved in the ITER Project, fusion and beyond. It is organized by the Korean Domestic Agency for ITER with the participation and support of the ITER Organization, the European Domestic Agency Fusion for Energy (F4E) and the other Domestic Agencies.   IBF Korea/14 will provide industries with updated information on ITER status, procurement procedures and forthcoming calls for tender (2014-2015). There will be special focus placed on the procurement status of the ITER Domestic Agencies and on their main suppliers (manufacturing status and potential needs in terms of partnerships, subcontractors, local support).   This event will include an industrial conference, one-to-one meetings (pre-reserved on line) and an optional program of technical tours. We hope you will take this opportunity to make business contacts with European or Asian companies involved to the ITER Project and your core business.   We look forward to seeing you at IBF Korea/14 in Seoul. 

With the smell of sesame oil and soy sauce in the air, the ITER Korea Day delivered on a promise of good food and fun activities. Korea Day took place on 21 March at the ITER Headquarters to much success. The Korea Day menu included specialties such as bulgogi (marinated Korean beef), Korean pancakes and Korean sushi. Korean opera singer Lee Hae Gee from Le Conservatoire National de Région Pierre Barbizet (Marseille) entertained the lunch crowd with traditional Korean songs. After lunch, Korean staff members set up a game centre in the lobby, where people were invited to participate in traditional Korean games such as Tuho, Yut Nori, and Jegichagi. These games date back hundreds of years and while the folk beliefs at their origin are less pertinent in our modern times, these games are still played in Korea, especially during New Year's celebrations and family gatherings. The event was organized with help from the Korean Domestic Agency and the Korea National Tourism Organization (KNTO), which provided additional support with game prizes and Korean tourist guides. You can find additional photos here.

Qualification activities for the ITER poloidal field converter package are continuing in China where—in the latest round of successful testing—the prototype of the poloidal field rectifier transformer successfully passed the third phase of routing and type tests.   From 25-28 February the rectifier transformer prototype fabricated by the Xi'an Transformer Co. Ltd (China XD Group) underwent testing in the presence of representatives from the ITER Organization, the Chinese Domestic Agency, the Institute of Plasma Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ASIPP), and XD in Xi'an. The positive results of this visual examination, following on the heels of recent successful short circuit tests, confirm the suitability of R&D carried out for the poloidal field rectifier transformer prototype.   The rectifier transformer is one of the key prototype components of the ITER poloidal field converter package. With the assistance of ASIPP, ITER China issued the technical requirements for the fabrication and testing of the prototype according to the Procurement Arrangement signed with the ITER Organization in August 2012, and subsequently awarded the contract to the XD Group in December 2012.   The supplier accomplished two procurement milestones in 2013—completing the manufacturing design review in April followed by the fabrication of the prototype—before fulfilling all required tests.   The capability for the large transformer to withstand short circuit current is essential to guaranteeing reliability under the harsh operating conditions of ITER; short circuit test statistics over the past decade have tended to show a very high failure rate (nearly 30 percent). As a key component of the ITER coil power supply system, the test was carried out in full compliance with the latest IEC standards. Several peak current impulses up to 350kA were applied to the transformer and the evolution of winding parameters measured between each current application.

Ever heard of Jamie Edwards? His name is all over the news these days as the wunderkind who, the media claim, "built a fusion reactor in his school laboratory."   Headlines blared in the UK, where the 13-year-old schoolboy lives, but also in the US, France, India, Australia, Japan, Thailand and on countless websites and news aggregators throughout the world. A Google request on "Jamie Edwards fusion" last week displayed more than 50,000 results.   The young Lancashire schoolboy is the last, and to this day the youngest, in a long series of media-acclaimed teenage "fusioneers." Thiago David Olson, from Michigan; Taylor Wilson, from Texas; Conrad Farnsworth, from Wyoming—all aged between 14 and 18 at the time of their accomplishment—are but a few of the media-proclaimed prodigies that have made global headlines over the past couple of years.   The story of the teenager who builds a fusion reactor in the school lab (or alternately in his dad's' basement or garage) is a recurrent media narrative. It is a 21st century variation of the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs sagas of 40 years ago—gifted kids who beat the giant companies and institutions in the race for innovation and eventually brought about a technological and cultural revolution.   But what have these young fusion apprentices actually achieved?   Let's take Jamie's experiment—"Jamie's five steps to fusion" as recently described in the London Daily Mail: 1) a vacuum is created in a reinforced metal tube; 2) deuterium gas "is slowly fed into the vacuum chamber"; 3) "18,000 volts current [is] applied to the vacuum"; 4) atoms "smash into each other"; 5) "Neutrons are released, proof that fusion has occurred"...   The young boy certainly deserves to be congratulated. It takes determination, know-how, precision and ingenuity to build and operate a school-lab fusion experiment. But from a scientific point of view what the boy achieved, his young age aside, is not so remarkable according to ITER neutron specialist Michael Loughlin. "He created a small electrostatic accelerator that accelerated deuterium nuclei and caused a few of them to crash into each other, fuse and produce a neutron. This is the very basis of commercially available neutron sources."   It is not even certain that the neutrons detected were actually fusion neutrons. "Jamie should conduct a number of control experiments," suggests Michael. "For example, he could use pure hydrogen gas instead of deuterium and check if the neutron signal is still there. Or establish the presence of helium and tritium in his gas chamber, which would provide proof that fusion had been achieved. But these measurements are probably beyond his budget..."   Jamie's experiment is still a long, long way from the "working fusion reactor" or the "star in a jar" that the media worldwide have trumpeted. Jamie's experiment is still a long, long way from the "working fusion reactor" or the "star in a jar" that the media worldwide have trumpeted. Jamie's device did not generate energy as a star does and as a fusion reactor will.   "The problem is that the deuterium nuclei are much more likely to bounce off each other than fuse and the energy used to accelerate them is lost," says Michael. "It is well known that an electrostatic device cannot generate more energy than it consumes."   Another young fusioneer who had his 15 minutes of fame some years ago stated the case very clearly and honestly: "Amateur reactors will never produce power," wrote 18-year-old Conrad Farnsworth on his website. "Their main purpose is education."   Then why did the media get so excited? Because the juxtaposition of the terms "fusion reactor," "school lab" and "13 year old" make an irresistible mix when assembled into a headline. And because it's always exciting to pretend that a young student with his Christmas money can achieve what multibillion euro projects have yet to demonstrate.   "We should not hold back from praising Jamie for a wonderful scientific experiment," says Michael. Like the young Lancashire student, many fusion physicists first heard their calling in the school lab. Who knows? In a few years Michael might be calling Jamie a colleague.

See the original article and the computer visualization on the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility website. Few problems have vexed physicists like fusion, the process by which stars fuel themselves and by which researchers on Earth hope to create the energy source of the future.   By heating the hydrogen isotopes tritium and deuterium to more than five times the temperature of the Sun's core, scientists create a reaction that could eventually produce electricity. Turns out, however, that confining the engine of a star to a manmade vessel and using it to produce energy is tricky business.   Big problems, such as this one, require big solutions. Luckily, few solutions are bigger than Titan, the Department of Energy's flagship Cray XK7 supercomputer managed by the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility.   Titan allows advanced scientific applications to reach unprecedented speeds, enabling scientific breakthroughs faster than ever with only a marginal increase in power consumption. This unique marriage of number-crunching hardware enables Titan, located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), to reach a peak performance of 27 petaflops to claim the title of the world's fastest computer dedicated solely to scientific research.  

The Final Design Review for the first lot of cooling water piping under Indian scope was held in early March at the Indian Domestic Agency in Gandhinagar.   Piping from India for ITER's cooling water system will be among the first completed components delivered to the ITER site in September or October of this year.   Representatives of the ITER Organization, ITER India and the prime contractor Larsen & Toubro attended the meeting. The design review panel, consisting of experts from the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL), the ITER Organization and the Indian Institute for Plasma Research (IPR), expressed appreciation for the work presented by the ITER-India Cooling Water System group and Larsen &vToubro. By end-2014, final design reviews for the remaining lots of piping and system will have been carried out in a phased manner.    Participants had the occasion to visit the subcontractor manufacturing facilities in Ahmedabad, Kutch and Vadodara. Larsen & Toubro and its subcontractors expressed full confidence that their scope of work would be accomplished according to schedule.

​The European Domestic Agency, with responsibility for the construction of the 39 buildings of the ITER installation, launched its first video on YouTube four years ago. Since then, over 100,000 viewers have followed its regular postings on site progress, industry collaboration and manufacturing. Find out more here.

​An exposition on ITER is running from now until 8 June at the Cité des Sciences (Parc de la Villette, Paris). Combining different media—display panels, videos, interviews—the exposition is designed to interest a wide public, including a younger audience. See the Cité des Sciences website for more information (in French).

​Researchers of the FOM Institute DIFFER have discovered that the wall material of a fusion reactor can shield itself from high energy plasma bursts. The wall material tungsten seems to expel a cloud of cooling hydrogen particles that serves as a protective layer. The research team publishes their results on 24 March 2014 in the journal Applied Physics Letters. [...] The heart of a fusion reactor like ITER contains an extremely hot plasma, from which short, intense energy bursts rain down on the reactor wall. In ITER, the tungsten wall will face powerful discharges of several gigawatts per square meter, several times per second.  However, researchers at FOM Institute DIFFER discovered that under some conditions less than half of that incoming energy actually hits the surface.The physicists used their linear plasma experiment Pilot-PSI to show that the tungsten surface shields itself from the blast by expelling a cloud of cooling hydrogen particles. This is the first time that fusion researchers see the energy pulses and the wall react to each other at this level of detail. Caption: Hydrogen plasma in DIFFER's linear plasma generator Pilot-PSI. Credit: Fundamental Research on Matter (FOM) Read more on the DIFFER website.    

​With a combined morning and evening circulation of more than 14 million, the Japanese daily Yomiuri Shimbun is number one among the world's biggest selling newspapers. Last Friday 21 March the Yomiuri dispatched one of its science reporters, Kyoichi Sasazawa, to the ITER site. The reporter met with ITER Director-General Osamu Motojima and ITER DDG Carlos Alejaldre and visited the ITER construction site. "In Japan, knowledge of fusion needs to be improved," he observed. The article he's preparing will be published in Japan in late April and will also appear in the English edition of the Yomiuri. Caption: DG Motojima and Yomiuri science writer Kyoichi Sasazawa take in the Tokamak Pit view from the Assembly Hall slab.  

​Twenty five years ago, University of Utah scientists announced a discovery that touched off a worldwide sensation. "Basically, we've established a sustained nuclear fusion reaction by means which are considerably simpler than conventional techniques," said Professor Stanley Pons on 23 March 1989. He was describing an experiment on the Utah campus that sent waves of optimism around the globe.   Some thought so-called "cold fusion" would solve the world's energy problems and lead to widespread peace and prosperity. But it wasn't long before those hopes crumbled. At least one prominent scientist later denounced it as "the scientific fiasco of the century." Read more here.