The governing body of the ITER Organization, the ITER Council, met for its sixteenth meeting in St Paul-lez-Durance, France, on 17 and 18 June 2015 under the chairmanship of Robert Iotti (US). For representatives of the ITER Members—China, the European Union, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and the United States—it was the occasion to take stock of the changes set into motion by the new ITER Director-General Bernard Bigot during his first 100 days in office. The Council welcomed the actions implemented to strengthen leadership and management in order to achieve a project-oriented organization, one tailored to the manufacturing, construction and assembly activities ahead. The closer integration of the ITER Organization Central Team and the seven Domestic Agencies, the reorganization of the Central Team, the creation of Project Teams to address system-wide issues and the implementation of a Reserve Fund were cited as examples by the Council. Work is progressing towards an updated project plan, which recognizes the serious accumulated delays, and which integrates the scope, cost and schedule for the Project going forward. This updated project plan includes a resource-loaded schedule, and will be discussed at the next Council meeting in November 2015. The Council requested that the ITER Organization and the Domestic Agencies, as well as the Members, continue to work closely to stop schedule slippage of critical/super-critical components by giving top priority to those components on the critical path as well as to freezing of the design. The Council also noted the progress in on-site construction and in the delivery of the first heavy components. Click to read the press release in English or French. Click for the photo gallery of the Sixteenth ITER Council (IC-16).

Come on board and fasten your seatbelts for this one-minute flight over the ITER construction site. We have used the time-lapse photos taken over the past twleve months and assembled them together with the recent footage taken by drone. You'll see, progress is visible ... and it's accelerating ...   See the video on YouTube here.

If only it were possible to read minds. It would have been interesting to know what that particular visitor was thinking as he leaned over the fence to stare down into the busy Tokamak Complex construction area, with its massive rebar and concrete structures. Perhaps how ITER is taking shape, after all these years...  Academician Evgeny Velikhov, current President of the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, is one of the masterminds behind the ITER Project. He helped to initiate the project at the highest political level by persuading Secretary-General Mikhail Gorbachev that the next generation of fusion device needed to be a joint international effort. He was ITER Council Chair during the technical design phase for ITER and again at the start of ITER construction from 2010-2012.   Academician Velikhov was on-site to attend the sixteenth ITER Council meeting held at Headquarters from 17 to 18 June, but for now it was time to see how construction was progressing. Escorted by the acting head of the ITER Tokamak Engineering Department, Alexander Alekseev, as well Section Leader Igor Sekachev, Velikhov—now in his eighties—was able to take full measure of the road travelled as he looked over the 42 hectare construction site spread out before him.   Back at Headquarters, he quickly removed the obligatory safety shoes and safety equipment to meet some of the Russian staff members at ITER before returning later that day to Moscow.

​​In this five-minute video produced by the European Domestic Agency for ITER, the type of specialized robotics, networks and virtual reality techniques used in deep sea or space operations find their application for ITER, where remote handling will be used to perform maintenance, inspection and repair tasks. The European agency is responsible for delivering four remote handling systems to ITER: the divertor remote handling system, the neutral beam remote handling system, the cask transfer system for activated components, and the in-vessel viewing and metrology system—in all, about EUR 250 million of investment. Recently, conclusive tests were carried out at the VTT Technical Research Centre in Tampere, Finland for the remote handling of ITER divertor cassettes—10-ton components that must be installed and/or exchanged through high-tech robotics.  Watch the video here.