In another step towards building the ITER fusion reactor, the US ITER team has worked with international partners to verify the performance of the ITER central solenoid conductor. Using a US-designed "insert coil" (a test coil inserted in a large, high-field magnet), the international team tested the Japanese-manufactured central solenoid conductor at the Japan Atomic Energy Agency test facility in Naka and evaluated the findings. Results showed that the conductor performed as predicted, without degradation.   The ITER central solenoid is under fabrication in the US at a General Atomics facility in Poway, California using conductor provided by Japan. The 1,000-metric-ton electromagnet, known as the "heartbeat" of ITER, will provide the majority of the magnetic flux needed to start and sustain ITER's plasma current. Over 42 kilometres of conductor will ultimately be wound into pancakes and assembled into the modules of the central solenoid. The electromagnet will have a magnetic field strength of up to 13 Tesla, or about 260,000 times the Earth's magnetic field.   "The testing in Naka verified conductor performance under conditions comparable to what the conductor will experience inside the ITER Tokamak—including temperature, magnetic field, current, and mechanical strain," said US ITER magnet team leader Wayne Reiersen.   Testing conductor before it is installed in the ITER machine is part of confirming the ITER design and assuring that the conductor will perform in the demanding ITER environment. ITER, which will be the largest tokamak ever built, will employ multiple superconducting magnet systems to confine plasma of over 100 million degrees within a vacuum vessel inside the 10-story-tall tokamak.   Read the full report of the test results on the US ITER website.

A first lot of cooling water pipes for ITER's chilled water and heat rejection systems arrived at ITER on 2 September, approximately one month after shipment from India.   In early August, the Indian Domestic Agency had overseen the loading of 24 pipes into two containers at the Inland Container Depot in Khodiyar, India. The containers were then taken by rail to Mundra Port and charged on an ocean-going vessel. The shipment reached port in France and was delivered by truck to the ITER site.   The 11-metre-long cooling pipes, ranging in diameter from 15 to 50 cm, make up the first lot of cooling water piping under Indian scope. In all, some 100 containers of piping are expected from India for ITER's cooling water systems.   The first batch of cooling water piping was loaded at the Inland Container Depot in Khodiyar, India in early August.. On the occasion of the first shipment, a ceremony was organized at the container depot with nearly 100 attendees from ITER India, the ITER Organization, contractor Larsen & Toubro, logistic partner Deugro India, and representatives from government and industry. ITER India project manager for cooling water systems, AG Ajith Kumar, welcomed all the delegates; speeches were also made by former ITER Deputy Director-General Dhiraj Bora, director of India's Institute for Plasma Research; Steve Ployhar, technical responsible officer from the ITER Organization; R. Govindrajan, project manager from Larsen & Toubro; and Shishir Deshpande, head of Indian Domestic Agency.   ITER Director-General Bernard Bigot conveyed his best wishes to the team live through teleconference.

Bruno Kahne gives lectures to the deaf. He knows about the importance of body language and uses it extensively while walking up and down the stage. But Kahne, who is the Head of Research and Development at the Airbus Group Leadership University, also knows about the power of words in delivering successful projects. He asks those assembled in the auditorium to close their eyes and NOT think of icebergs and polar bears. The chemistry in our neurotransmitters works as foreseen and immediately white bears float along an imaginary arctic landscape. Laughter spreads; the trick worked. "You see," Kahne said, "it's all about communication."   Bruno Kahne was one of the speakers at the "Fusing the Project World" project management conference held at ITER on 4 September. For the first time project management—a profession that plays a crucial role in a complex project like ITER, with its hundreds of thousands of activities and its in-kind contributions from seven partners—was elevated to centre stage in the amphitheatre of ITER Headquarters.   The one-day conference was organized in collaboration with "eVa in the UK" and the Project Management Institute (PMI). It offered a first-hand opportunity for the 300 participants to exchange ideas and experience with an impressive line-up of leading project management speakers like Harley Lovegrove from the Bayard Partnership; Benita Cegarra from BJC Europe; Harvey Maylor from the Said Business School at Oxford University (who shared his recipe for bringing simplicity to complex projects); and Simon Addyman—a decorated Project Professional for his role in the successful upgrade of the London Underground's Bank Station—with a novel route for procurement.    ITER Director-General Bernard Bigot welcomes participants to the first project management conference held at ITER. The conference was opened by ITER Director-General Bernard Bigot who introduced the project and its specificities to the more than 100 non-ITER participants in the audience. Asked whether he would see ITER as "project" or rather a "program" in project management parlance, the Director-General replied that it is both. "It's a project because we need to deliver a facility that suits the requirements of the world scientific community. But it also can be considered a program because of the number of stakeholders, the long timescale and the fact that we need to associate industry and laboratories."   Mr Bigot's introduction was followed by an inspiring talk on the promise of fusion by Steven Cowley, Chief Executive Officer at the Atomic Energy Authority of the United Kingdom (UKAEA). According to Cowley, the fusion experiments that will take place at ITER in the future will be a defining moment in the history of the world, one that he hopes to witness first-hand from the ITER control room (see related article in this issue).   Stephen Carver, senior lecturer at Cranfield University (UK), told the audience that project success comes down to good communication in his talk titled "Creating Vision with Storytelling." "People are not inspired to act by reason alone," he stressed. "That's why stories are vital for leaders. And you here at ITER have a good story to tell. A hell of a good story!"   Roberto Saban, Head of Engineering from CERN, concluded the presentations by describing the evolution of project management tools and techniques at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). According to Saban, Earned Value Management (EVM) wasn't implemented until mid-way through the project. However, it has become a part of the project management toolkit that is used by every project since that time.   All presentations from the project management conference can be downloaded here.

"There are moments in history where people present in a certain room ... a certain place ... are conscious of living a moment of great transition. Let me tell you, ITER will be one of those."   Steven Cowley*, one of the world's leading experts and fusion science, is convinced that fusion is the perfect way to make energy. With the near unlimited availability of raw materials (sea-based stores of deuterium and lithium could cover fusion needs for 60 billion and 30 million years, respectively) and the potential to produce huge amounts of carbon-free energy with almost no environmental impact, fusion is too good not to pursue.   "Once we figure out how to do it in a commercially viable way," he says, "fusion will dominate world energy production."   The difficulty, of course, is that fusion is incredibly hard to do. Although scientists have been able achieve deuterium-tritium in the laboratory—including Cowley's laboratory in the UK at Culham—they have not yet been able to sustain it. "That's where ITER comes in," Cowley told the 300 participants to the "Fusing the Project World" project management conference held at the ITER Organization on 4 September.   "We'll have achieved the ITER Baseline once we've been able to produce 500 MW of fusion energy at a flat-top burn of 400 seconds," he stressed to the audience. "But our best models predict that at that level, beyond 400 seconds, we may be able to turn off external heating because the plasma is sustained by the reaction itself. If that is achieved it would be the world's first ignited plasma and the demonstration that fusion is the next global energy source."   Reaching that historic milestone in what he describes as "one of the most amazing pieces of technology built in the 21st century" is a critical step on the road to achieving fusion energy. Following that, a lot of engineering will still be necessary to get the reactor to a stage where it is commercially viable. "ITER is an experiment, not a power station," he stressed. "We need to find out exactly how things behave when you take them to a certain level." "When ITER achieves the first self-sustained fusion burn I hope to be sitting in the control room. A little older—in fact, perhaps a lot older—but for me as a scientist, it will probably be the crowning moment of my lifetime."   * Steven Cowley is Chief Executive Officer of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority and Head of EURATOM/CCFE Fusion Association, which hosts the JET and MAST tokamaks.

Work keeps progressing inside the Tore Supra tokamak at CEA-Cadarache. Operational since 1988, the CEA-Euratom machine is undergoing a major transformation (the WEST project) in order to serve as a test bench for ITER.   On 29 July, operations to position the coil casings for the tungsten divertor began. Contrary to ITER, Tore Supra will need an extra coil located in the divertor area to create the  "X point" that draws the plasma to the divertor. © Christophe ROUX CEA-IRFM   More information in issue #10 of the WEST Newsletter.

Three drain tanks—two for the cooling water system of the ITER Tokamak and a third for the neutral beam injection system—were unloaded in the French port of Fos-sur-Mer on 6 September.   Procured and shipped by the US as part of its in-kind contributions to the project, the drain tanks will now travel along the ITER Itinerary to the site, where they're expected on 17 September.

T​he 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 the Japan Atomic Energy Agency 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. Recent progress has been reported in the fabrication of equilibrium field coils and the vacuum vessel thermal shield, as well as the procurement of the quench detection system. Read more in the August issue of the JT-60SA Newsletter or on the European Domestic Agency website.