A cryostat feedthrough delivered by the Chinese Domestic Agency has become the first metal component of the machine to be installed in the Tokamak Pit, in an operation orchestrated over two weeks by the ITER Organization. An activity that began with the transfer of the component to the vicinity of the Tokamak Complex—and that was pursued as the 10-metre, 6.6-tonne component was introduced into the Pit through an opening in the bioshield roof—has now been concluded through the final positioning of the feeder segment in the building.   In the final lift sequence, the elbow-shaped component was raised by the monorail crane at the bottom of the Tokamak Pit, rotated above the cryostat crown, and lowered into a slim opening that had been left in the concrete circle in anticipation of this very installation sequence. Positioned on a temporary support tool supplied by the Korean Domestic Agency, technicians used cables to draw the horizontal segment of the feedthrough into the bioshield opening, while the vertical segment fell into place between the crown and the bioshield. (See more detail in the photo gallery below.)   Final adjustments were performed through metrology measurements to fall within +/- 2 mm with respect to the Tokamak Global Coordinate System.   If magnet feeders are the essential lifelines of the ITER magnets—carrying electricity, cryogenic fluids and instrumentation cables—"feedthroughs" are the part of the feeder assemblies that cross through the bioshield and the cryostat. This first completed unit had been delivered last year to the Magnet Infrastructure Facilities for ITER (MIFI) where, as a first-of-a-kind component, it underwent high-voltage tests, leak tests and endoscopic inspection.   Ultimately, the feedthrough will be joined by two other components—an in-cryostat feeder (nearest the vacuum vessel) and a coil termination box (outside the bioshield)—to connect to poloidal field coil #4, one of the two largest of the machine's six poloidal field coils (24 metres in diameter).   "A large number of actors played a critical role in the installation operation that concluded last week," notes Bruno Levesy, Group Leader of the In-Cryostat Assembly Section, with satisfaction, "The Domestic Agencies of China (fabrication) and Korea (tooling), the ITER Organization logistics provider DAHER (transport), European Domestic Agency building contractors, ITER's Construction Management-as-Agent contractor, and the French company CNIM (which won the early works contract in the Tokamak Pit) all participated." Giobatta Lanfranco (Construction Team) and Bruno were the most involved staff members of the ITER Organization. "It has been a good practice in coordination for the many activities to come."

In 2020, for the first time in more than 20 years, a reaction that only occurs in the core of the stars will be produced on Earth in a man-made machine. In the European JET, the largest tokamak presently in operation, deuterium and tritium will fuse again as they did with spectacular results in the late 1990s and, more discreetly, in the 2003 campaign. In 1991, JET was the first machine to produce a significant amount of power from deuterium-tritium (DT) fusion. Six years later, the DT campaign culminated with a 16 MW shot and—less spectacular but more significant for the future of fusion—with a series of 5-second, 4 MW stationary shots in H mode, which formed the basis for an extrapolation to ITER.   With the exception of trace tritium experiments in 2003, the JET campaign in the 1990s was the last time that actual fusion fuels were implemented in the European machine.   As the ITER Organization is now preparing to assemble the ITER machine in time for a first, non-nuclear plasma in 2025, JET is being groomed for yet another DT campaign—although this time in a different context and with different objectives.   "In 1997, JET aimed at producing maximum power and did it in conditions that were not fully representative of ITER operation," explains Xavier Litaudon, the head of the EUROfusion ITER physics department. "Today, things are different. We are aiming for stability rather than peak performance. And we will be operating in conditions that will be those of ITER."   The JET of today is a very different machine from the JET of the previous decades. Now equipped with a beryllium wall and a tungsten-clad divertor, it is the only tokamak to present the same material environment as ITER.   The objective is not to break records says Xavier Litaudon, the head of the EUROfusion ITER physics department. "We are aiming for stability rather than peak performance in operating conditions that will be those of ITER." Despite technical limitations (essentially due to its non-superconducting magnetic system and non-actively cooled divertor), JET can now be described as an "ITER-like machine," and the feedback from the upcoming DT campaign will be of immense value to the much larger, much more powerful international tokamak.   "JET is bringing one essential contribution to future ITER operations," adds Litaudon. "WEST, with its capacity to produce non-nuclear plasmas up to a 1,000-second duration, is bringing another."   For Litaudon and the JET team "what matters now is not to break records," nor even to improve the input-to-output ratio¹, but to develop a plasma regime that can be extrapolated and implemented in ITER.   "The objective that has been assigned to the 2020 DT campaign is to produce plasmas generating approximately 15 MW of fusion power during 5 seconds," explains Litaudon.   Two approaches have been developed to help reduce the effects of disruptions, both based on the delivery of material inside the plasma within milliseconds. One consists in injecting massive quantities of gas into the plasma, the other in shooting frozen gas pellets. Experiments conducted on the DIII-D National Fusion Facility at General Atomics (US) have demonstrated that the latter was better adapted to the ITER environment and operating mode. In order to establish that shattered pellet injection (SPI) is a technology that can be extrapolated to ITER, a significant part of JET's upcoming campaign will be devoted to testing the pellet injector developed by the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). A collaboration agreement involving the ITER Organization, the US ITER Project Office, the ORNL Fusion and Materials for Nuclear Science Division, EURATOM (including the EUROfusion Consortium that is responsible for the JET scientific program), and the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (operator of the JET facility) has been set-up in order to build, install and operate an SPI system for disruption mitigation on JET. Testing of the shattered pellet injection system on JET is set to begin in May 2019. In 2015-2016, in preparation for the upcoming DT operations, JET went through an eight-week technical rehearsal with hydrogen and deuterium plasmas. "By extrapolating the amount of neutrons produced during these experiments, we can estimate that, had we implemented the actual fusion fuels, we would have obtained 8 MW of power for a few seconds. This is about half the power and half the duration we expect from the 2020 campaign."   Litaudon acknowledges that "it will be difficult" and that the machine will be "pushed to the limits." Some 40 MW of heating power will be injected into the DT plasmas, 5 to 6 MW from the ion cyclotron resonance heating (ICRH) system, with the remainder from the "old" but significantly upgraded neutral beam injection system that already had been used in the 1997 campaign and is considerably less powerful than the ITER neutral beam system.   Before entering the DT phase, JET will experiment with "pure tritium" plasmas—a first in the history of fusion research. "Because of the nuclear structure of tritium (one proton, two neutrons), a pure tritium plasma is heavier than a plasma with deuterium (one proton, one neutron). By implementing a pure tritium plasma and interpolating the results from both deuterium and tritium plasmas we'll get a much more precise idea of the behaviour of an actual DT plasma."   By the end of the 2020 campaign, JET, already a venerable installation, will have reached the canonical age (for a tokamak at least) of 36 years. "Logically, the end of the campaign should be the end of JET, but we are working on an extension into at least 2024. We can make the machine even more ITER-like. And if our colleagues at ITER have a question or a theory, we want be able to respond: 'No problem, let's test it on JET...'"   Keeping JET in activity beyond 2020 also means that a machine will be available to train ITER operators—a key issue for EUROfusion. "In ten years, even the best engineers and physicists can lose their knowledge and competence if they don't put them to test."   ¹- In 1997, the ratio between heating power input and fusion power output, or "Q," was on the order of 0.70. Improving "Q" is not among the objectives of the 2020 DT campaign at JET. ITER aims for "Q ≥ 10": 50 MW of heating power → 500 MW of fusion power.

It is rare for students to leave university and immediately begin work on a globally significant project. But thanks to the graduate program run by the project's Construction Management-as-Agent (CMA) contractor, MOMENTUM, that's exactly what is happening at ITER. There are currently five graduates working with MOMENTUM, with another two due to join early next year. Two former participants have already been promoted to important jobs on site.   "We have benefited in so many ways from having graduates as part of our team," says CMA Project Director Angie Jones. "They belong to a generation that has grown up with digital technology, they are highly motivated, and they have brought us a refreshing new perspective and innovative ways to solve problems."   The ideal profile for the MOMENTUM graduate program is a student who has finished a university or Master's program in engineering, project controls, or HSE (health, safety and environment) within the past two years, and who is highly motivated.   "By joining our on-site program, graduates gain by developing their construction and project knowledge and have the opportunity to move into high-potential graduate or junior roles."   Grégoire Daumy, 26, is one of them. He joined the training program after completing his Master's degree in nuclear physics; now he is construction coordinator for the cryoplant, where his job is to draw up coordination plans with contractors from different fields and cultural backgrounds and be a constant presence on site to ensure that the plans are implemented safely.   Coline Larcher, 25, is about to step up to junior workface planner, having successfully completed her MOMENTUM graduate training. Coline, an engineering graduate, has been providing planning support for the project control team on change request management and for the Tokamak Complex construction team. As a workface planner, she will be giving guidance to contractors about their short-term work schedules.   The four other graduates working on site for MOMENTUM are Solène Vailhen, assistant project coordinator; Charlotte Blache, mechanical engineer; Jieun Kim, document controller; and Guillem Monso, cost estimator. Past graduate Laura Bertolo has moved, like Grégoire, into the role of site coordinator.   "MOMENTUM is very proud of its graduate program. It is starting to produce real benefits both for us, as Construction Management-as-Agent to a first-of-a-kind project, and for the ITER Organization," concludes Jones.   For more information on MOMENTUM please visit this site. Candidates interested in the graduate program can contact either @email or @email.

The contract, awarded to ALSYOM-SEIV (ALCEN group, France), launches the manufacturing phase for the beam source that will come on line in 2022 as part of the full-power, full-scale test bed for ITER neutral beam injection at the ITER Neutral Beam Test Facility in Italy. A supplier has been chosen for the fabrication of the MITICA beam source—a prototype of the ITER neutral beam heating beam source that will generate 40 A of negative hydrogen or deuterium ions. These negative ions, once extracted and accelerated to unprecedented energy levels (1MeV), will be injected as deuterium beams of 16.5 MW into the ITER plasma where they will transfer their energy by way of collision to contribute to plasma heating.   MITICA (for Megavolt ITER Injector and Concept Advancement) is going up alongside a sister testbed SPIDER at the Neutral Beam Test Facility in Padua, Italy, in order to allow scientists to investigate challenging physics and technology issues and validate concepts before the neutral beam system—the most powerful in the world—is installed on ITER. ITER will host two neutral beam injectors and space is reserved for a third in order to maintain an important potential for flexibility in the operation of the ITER facility should an upgrade be decided. The heating neutral beam source—situated inside the neutral beam injector—is 3 metres wide, 3 metres deep and 4.5 metres high with a total weight of 15 tonnes.   Under the terms of a first-stage framework contract with the European Domestic Agency, three suppliers were in competition to finalize the MITICA beam source build-to-print design and to initiate manufacturing documentation. This first stage, which served to mitigate fabrication issues before the start of the manufacturing phase (stage two), has now concluded with the selection of ALSYOM-SEIV (ALCEN group, France) as supplier.   See the full report on the website of the European Domestic Agency, Fusion for Energy.  

Five months, almost to the day, after the US Secretary of Energy Rick Perry visited ITER, his deputy, Under Secretary for Science Paul Dabbar, stood by the same vast windows in the Director-General's meeting room, taking in the same impressive view of construction progress. Guided by ITER Director-General Bernard Bigot, the Undersecretary and his senior advisor Chris Fall spent a long time on the ITER construction site for a thorough visit of the buildings and factories.   The Under Secretary and the Director-General had in-depth discussions on the recent progress of the project and the challenges ahead, both stressing the value of the large international cooperation and the importance of ITER as a core element of the US fusion research program.

On 3 December, over 1,100 ITER staff, contractors, partners, families and friends celebrated the end of 2018 as a successful year for the ITER Project and its mission to create clean and safe energy for the future. Opening the evening at the Grand Théâtre de Provence in Aix-en-Provence, ITER Director-General Bernard Bigot told the audience that "our progress is the result of hard work, creative problem-solving and strong commitment on the part of every member of the ITER Team." The highlight of the evening was the show of the award-winning shadow dance team Die Mobilés from Germany, whose masterful play with shapes, light and music took the audience on a tour to ITER Member countries around the world and through a short history of film. With astonishing creativity and as a special surprise for the audience, the artists brought ITER to life on stage—including a depiction of a busy worksite and a Tokamak model. See a video clip from the show here.

Registration is now open for the 10th ITER International School, which will take place in Daejeon, Korea, from 21 to 25 January 2019. The registration fee for foreign students of KRW 340,000 (equivalent to around EUR 265, VAT included) includes accommodation, lunches and dinners, and bus service between the hotel and the school. The ITER International School aims to prepare young scientists/engineers for work in the field of nuclear fusion and in research applications associated with the ITER Project. The 10th edition, to be held at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Daejeon, is organized around "The Physics and Technology of Power Flux Handling in Tokamaks." This subject has an interdisciplinary character: power flux handling in tokamaks is key challenge for the development of nuclear fusion, but one that can only be resolved through the integration of physics-based approaches to decrease power fluxes on the tokamak wall together with technological developments for tokamak wall components. For more information or to register, please visit www.iterschool2019.kr.