On 29 January 2007, ten years ago almost to the day, preparation work began on the large stretch of national forest that was to host the ITER site. Part of France's commitment to the ITER Project, the works were performed under the responsibility of Agence Iter France, an agency of the French Commissariat à l'énergie atomique (CEA) that had been established three months earlier. France was to deliver a perfectly flat platform and some cleared areas to accommodate buildings, parking spaces, roads, etc. Of the 180 hectares made available by France, half were to be equipped, the other half left untouched.   To create a level, 42-hectare platform for the scientific installation, about half of the surface needed to be excavated and the other half filled. In total, over a period of less than two years, more than 3 million cubic metres of rock and soil were moved—equivalent in volume to the Cheops pyramid.   In the course of their investigations, archaeologists were to identify a small necropolis dating from the 5th to 7th century AD. But before letting in the chainsaws, scrapers and earth-moving equipment, a few delicate and important tasks needed to be performed: scores of "remarkable trees" were identified for preservation; specific measures were implemented to protect some of the native species (beetles, bats, etc.) that made the forest their home and—in conformity with French regulations—archaeologists began digging in search of buried structures and artefacts.   By April, the area was cleared and ready for the spectacular levelling works that were finalized in the spring of 2009.   Click here to view a drone flyover of the ITER construction site, ten years after the early preparation works began.    

For further details, please see the full article in Nuclear Fusion here. Small irregularities, or "error fields," in the magnetic field of tokamaks may lead to effects that include degradation of plasma confinement and generation of plasma instabilities.   In tokamaks such as ITER, these irregularities are "smoothed" using special control coils. In the ITER design, 18 superconducting correction coils inserted between the toroidal and poloidal field coils will compensate for field errors caused by geometrical deviations due to manufacturing and assembly tolerances.   However efficient methods to detect the error fields and to determine the optimum currents in the correction coils have been a challenge in present devices.   Scientists at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility—the largest magnetic fusion facility in the United States—have developed a new method for minimizing magnetic field asymmetries in a tokamak. The method is based on maximizing rotation of the confined plasma during a single discharge and has been successfully tested in preliminary experiments at DIII-D.   The research team consisted of scientists from multiple institutions, including General Atomics, Oak Ridge Associated Universities, University of California-San Diego, and Columbia University.   Rather than apply an approximate, pre-calculated correction, the new method continuously adjusts the currents in the correction coils. One effect of an error field is a braking force that reduces the plasma's rotation, so the control system measures the plasma rotation in real-time while continuously varying the correction field. Using modern control science methods, this process rapidly determines the optimal correction field that minimizes the braking.   Real-time maximization of the plasma rotation has several advantages: efficient optimization of the correction field within a single discharge (simulations suggest that the optimization process can be performed in ITER in a few tens of seconds); minimization of the risk to inadvertently destabilize the plasma; and continuous tracking of variations in error field sources to maintain the best plasma conditions throughout the discharge.   These advantages make this new method a promising option for improving the operation of ITER by minimizing the undesirable effects of error fields.     Source: General Atomics

When ITER enters operation, orders originating in the control room for the electrical networks will be processed in "E-houses," where dozens of instrumentation and control (I&C) cubicles will relay them to the switchyard's high voltage components. The E-house for the steady-state electrical network (SSEN) is already in place within the confines of the 400 kV switchyard situated at the southwest end of the ITER platform. Counterparts for the pulsed power electrical network (PPEN)—procured by China—were unloaded last week in Fos-sur-Mer and are scheduled for delivery to the ITER site on 9 February.   One E-house is for the 400kV switchyard which connects to the French grid; the other is for the 66 kV switchyard that powers magnet power supplies and part of the plasma heating systems.   Similar in look to windowless mobile homes, the PPEN E-houses are comparable in size to a three-room apartment and come fully equipped with HVAC, control panels, cabling and switchgear.   Weighing respectively 50 and 60 tonnes, the two loads are among the widest that will be delivered to ITER.

There's no easy road to fusion. Whether one travels the large route forged by six decades of research on hundreds of machines, or whether one tries to open a way through uncharted and exotic territory, difficulties abound and challenges loom large. Over the past few years, several private sector startups have raised enough capital to launch their scientists and engineers into the race to harness fusion power. Tri Alpha Energy and Helion Energy in the US; Tokamak Energy and First Light Fusion in the UK; General Fusion in Canada and scores of others ... all claim they can deliver within the coming decade.   How they can succeed with a few tens or hundreds of million dollars in investment and a workforce that rarely exceeds a few dozen specialists is an open question—one that everyone present in the ITER amphitheatre on Monday 23 January had in mind.   The guest that day was physicist Michel Laberge, founder and chief scientist of General Fusion, the company that boasts it is ─ in the present tense ─ "transforming the world's energy supply with clean, safe and abundant fusion energy".   There is a world, of course, between the claim inscribed on the opening page of General Fusion's website and the present status of the company's research and experimentation. Facing a receptive and curious audience of fusion specialists, Laberge didn't seek to minimize the technical challenges his company is facing.   For anybody familiar with magnetic fusion and tokamaks, General Fusion's approach is quite exotic: no vacuum vessel in their planned fusion machine but a spherical tank filled with a liquid lead-lithium mixture spun into a vortex; no giant superconducting magnet system to confine the plasma but an array of pistons to compress it by way of a powerful shock wave...   Physicist Michel Laberge, founder and chief scientist of General Fusion, didn't seek to minimize the technical challenges his company is facing. The concept, called "magnetized target fusion" originated in the mid-1970s. It combines features of magnetic confinement fusion (like in ITER and other tokamaks) and inertial confinement fusion (like in the US National Ignition Facility or the French Laser Mégajoule).   "We aim to do fusion somewhere in the middle ground," said Laberge in his introduction. Supported by detailed graphs, high-speed videos and precise figures, his presentation and the ensuing exchanges were highly technical and at no moment was there any hint of condescendence or irony—from either side of the podium.   The encounter between the largest science project on the planet and a small, determined startup in western Canada, demonstrated that, at the end of the day, the fusion community—dreamers, explorers, experimenters—is really just one.

The Satellite Tokamak Program, JT-60SA, is a major modification of the existing JT-60U tokamak at the Naka Fusion Institute in Japan. Part of the Broader Approach Agreement signed between Japan and Euratom (and implemented by QST Japan and the European Domestic Agency for ITER), it is designed to support the operation of ITER and to investigate how best to optimize the design and operation of fusion power plants built after ITER.   When it comes on line in 2019 after a six-year assembly and commissioning period, the JT-60SA research program will investigate critical areas of plasma physics, fusion engineering and theoretical models and simulation codes. These include the development of optimized operational regimes; questions of stability and control, transport and confinement, and high-energy particle behaviour; pedestal and edge physics; plasma-material interaction; fusion engineering; and theoretical models and simulation codes.   In recent assembly news, the first two D-shaped toroidal field magnets have been successfully positioned around the machine's torus. Commissioning of the JT-60SA cryoplant has also been brought to a successful completion and ownership transferred from the European Domestic Agency to QST. Over the next three years the cryogenic plant will be progressively integrated with the cryodistribution and magnet systems.   See the full report published on the European Domestic Agency website.

For its 2017 edition, the ITER Business Forum (IBF/17) will convene in the ancient city of Avignon, in the south of France. Industrial partners, stakeholders, project experts and interested firms will be welcomed in a historic setting—the Palace of the Popes—from 28 to 30 March. After a successful 2015 edition, which attracted over 800 delegates, and a 2016 edition hosted in conjunction with the Monaco-ITER International Fusion Days (MIIFED), registration is going strong for this year's edition, with more than 400 company delegates already registered. As ITER transitions from building construction to the ITER machine and plant assembly phase, it is estimated that EUR 1 to 2 billion of contracts will be awarded over the next four years by the ITER Organization and the Domestic Agencies. IBF/17, organized by Agence Iter France with the participation of the ITER Organization and the Domestic Agencies, will focus on the new business opportunities that these additional contracts will generate. The program of the three-day event includes an industrial conference with presentations by ITER Organization, the Domestic Agencies and their main suppliers;  B2B ("business-to-business") meetings between industrial companies; B2C ("business to customer") meetings between companies and the ITER Organization or Domestic Agencies; networking opportunities; and an optional program of technical tours on 28 March, including an ITER site visit. For more information on the 2017 ITER Business Forum and information on how to register please visit the dedicated website.

Could high-entropy alloys—a combination of different metals in roughly equal concentration—turn out to be THE material for fusion reactors? That's the question materials physicists from the University of Helsinki (Finland) and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (US) are investigating. The concept behind the creation of these alloys is ten years old and was first proposed by metallurgists. But based on work done at Oak Ridge, where these new hybrid metals were being tested under the influence of radiation, researchers in Finland began running experiments and simulations using different mixtures with nickel. High-entropy alloys appear to be much more resistant to radiation than pure alloys. To date, the labs at Oak Ridge and the University of Helsinki have just combined two, three or four elements, whereas millions of possible combinations exist. See the report on the EUROfusion website.