The last time the ITER staff was assembled on the worksite was September 2011, a little more than one year after construction began in earnest. At that time, only one building stood on the platform—the near-finished Poloidal Field Coils Winding Facility.   Four years and a few months later work is underway on the second underground level of the Tokamak Complex; the Assembly Hall rises 60 metres above platform level; the Cryoplant, Cleaning Facility, Site Services, Cooling Systems and Control buildings are all at various stages of preparation; and large machine components are already stored in the Cryostat Workshop, ready to be assembled and welded.   The gathering of ITER staff on-site was long overdue. The month of January and its traditional New Year's wishes, and the presence in the vast hall of the Cryostat Workshop of large pieces of steel from the cryostat base, provided the opportunity.   "Look how massive they are—and consider they represent only one-eighth of the total mass of the 3,850-tonne ITER cryostat," said ITER Director-General Bernard Bigot in his address. "Indeed, we are building a big machine..."   There was awe, and there was pride at this vision.   There was awe and pride at the vision of the large pieces of steel for the cyostat base stored in the Cryostat Workshop. ITER had come a long way since the Geneva Summit 30 years ago. "It has acquired a concrete and spectacular reality," added Bernard Bigot. "This building is ITER. These steel parts are ITER. Most important of all—you are ITER!"   Along the long way there may have been doubts and sometimes discouragement. "But ITER is too important to let these feelings take hold of us. What we are working for is much bigger than we are. What is at stake with ITER—and with fusion—is energy safety for the generations to come. And energy safety is one of the first conditions for a better life for all."   With this in mind, the ITER staff (some 550 out of 650 staff members were present) closed ranks for the official photograph—a very impressive one, which conveyed the pride, commitment and enthusiasm of the men and women from 35 nations working to translate into reality "the dream of three generations of fusion physicists."   How the ITER staff grew — view slideshow below.

Tooling and testing activities are underway on ITER poloidal field coil number 6 (PF6) in China, reports the European Domestic Agency that is responsible for procuring this poloidal field coil and four others.   In a workshop at the Institute of Plasma Physics/Chinese Academy of Sciences (ASIPP) in Hefei, engineers have been conducting trials to qualify and test the winding tooling and carry out vacuum chamber leak tests, welding tests and insulation qualification tests.   Six ring-shaped coils, situated outside of the toroidal field magnet structure, will act to shape the plasma in ITER and contribute to its stability by keeping it away from the walls. The smallest poloidal field coil (PF1) situated at the top of the machine will be supplied by Russia; the five others (PF2-6) are under the procurement responsibility of Europe. The four largest coils under European procurement responsibility will be manufactured in an on-site facility (see tooling progress in this issue), while the second-smallest coil, PF6, will be manufactured in China according to an agreement concluded with the European agency.   The 350-ton, 10-metre coil will be leak tested in this vacuum chamber. Poloidal field coil number six will measure 10 metres in diameter and will weigh approximately 350 tonnes. Nine double pancakes (flat, spiralled coils) wound from niobium-titanium conductor will be stacked to form the final coil assembly. ICAS (the consortium responsible for the production of European conductors) has already shipped six conductor unit lengths to China, as well as two copper dummies to be used in testing; the rest of the conductors will reach China in 2016.   Read the full report on the European Domestic Agency website.

The 8th ITER International School took place on 14-18 December at the School of Nuclear Science and Technology of the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei (SNST-USTC). This year the focus was on transport and pedestal physics in tokamaks, which is a key R&D area for optimizing fusion performance in ITER.   The ITER International School is an annual international meeting that is jointly organized by the Aix-Marseille Université and the ITER Organization, and which takes place alternately near ITER and in one of the other ITER partner countries. The International School answers the need for training postgraduate students and young researchers in the field of fusion research and it has naturally become a worldwide reference for the preparation of a new generation of researchers for ITER's scientific exploitation.   The 8th ITER International School in December achieved an impressive attendance of more than 140 students (~75 percent from Chinese universities) and 17 leading scientific experts from the ITER partner countries and the ITER Organization who gave lectures.   Five days of lectures and visits—the 8th ITER International School in China was a unique opportunity for students to explore frontier physics to share their enthusiasm for fusion with leading experts in the field (pictured: Alberto Loarte of the ITER Organization). The opening session included statements from USTC Vice-President C. Chen; SNST Dean Y. Wan; Organizing Committee Chair H. Qin from USTC; and Director of the Physics Laboratory of Ionic and Molecular Interactions (Aix-Marseille University) J-M Layet on behalf of the host university/school and organizing university, respectively. This was followed by presentations on the status of ITER by ITER Organization's Alberto Loarte and the status of activities for the Chinese fusion energy program  and Fusion Engineering Test Reactor by J. Li from the Institute of Plasma Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences.   The five-day event featured 16 lectures that dealt with the physics of the edge and pedestal plasmas including plasma energy and particle transport, magneto-hydrodynamics stability, Edge Localized Modes (ELMs) and their control, and the effects of ELM-driven transient power fluxes on plasma-facing materials. (The program and all lectures can be found here.) In addition, the ITER International School included a tour of the Institute of Plasmas Physics, where the participants visited the EAST tokamak as well as facilities for the manufacturing and testing of in-kind components for ITER such as the superconductor cable for the toroidal field coils, the high temperature superconductor feeders for ITER's magnets and the test stand for the AC/DC converter units for the poloidal field magnetic coils.   The 8th ITER International School was a unique opportunity for young and talented students to explore the frontier physics of the ITER pedestal plasma and its influence on ITER's fusion performance and to share their enthusiasm for the development of fusion energy and the ITER Project with leading experts in the field.    

The final design review of the gas distribution manifold system, part of ITER's gas injection system, was held from 8 to 10 December 2015 in Chengdu, China. More than 40 participants attended the review either on-site or remotely, including 13 panel members and participants from the ITER Organization, the Chinese Domestic Agency, and the contracting institute Southwestern Institute of Physics.   The gas injection system in ITER is responsible for the "initial fill" of the vacuum chamber prior to plasma initiation; for puffing gas into the chamber during the ramp-up phase; for controlling plasma density during the flattop of plasma burn; and for protecting the divertor targets from discharges by injecting impurity gases.   In order to service the pellet injection, gas fuelling, neutral beam and disruption mitigation systems, different gas species from the Tritium Plant (hydrogenic species, helium, and the impurity gases argon, neon and nitrogen) will be delivered via a gas distribution manifold to gas valve boxes located in the vacuum vessels ports. According to the ITER machine assembly schedule, this gas distribution manifold system is expected on site before the rest of the gas injection system; for this reason, a separate design review was organized.   The three-day review took place in December in China with participants from the ITER Organization, the Chinese Domestic Agency, and the contracting institute Southwestern Institute of Physics. The manifold system consists of six gas supply lines and one evacuation line enclosed in a guard pipe for safe tritium handling. The main design challenge has been to avoid the interference of pipe junctions in vertical and horizontal directions, while taking into account the limited available space along the manifold route and the feasibility of assembly and maintenance. During the optimization process, up to four junction configurations were designed for each type of gas valve box. Prototypes of the different elements of the gas distribution manifold system have been produced to test manufacturability and assembly feasibility, and to allow for further optimization.   Prof. Wang Yan, the chairman of the review panel, confirmed the suitability of the design and thanked the manifold team members for their hard work and effort. Based on feedback from the review, the focus will now be to perfect the design and ensure a smooth transition from the final design phase to the manufacturing readiness review phase.

We've seen it on drawings and posters: how unit lengths of superconductor will be "de-spooled," straightened, cleaned, bent , wrapped in insulating tape and finally wound into flat, spiralled coil layers called "double pancakes" to form the building blocks of the ITER magnets.   Now, looking down from the observation gallery in the Poloidal Field Coils Winding Facility, it's easier to imagine how drawings will translate into the reality of an industrial process.   The coil winding tooling is in place—colour-coded yellow for the moving parts and blue for the static ones. Two tower-like de-spooler structures stand near the winding table (to the left of the photo) that measures 16 metres in diameter; to the right, is a support structure that will be used after the winding operations in preparation for the impregnation phase.   The European Domestic Agency plans to beginning winding operations on the first "dummy" poloidal field coil (destined to qualify tooling and processes) this summer.

From 8 to 11 February, the Monaco-ITER International Fusion Energy Days (MIIFED) will combine with the ITER Business Forum (IBF) to create a single event dedicated to ITER progress and upcoming business opportunities. Over 400 participants from 200 companies have already registered for MIIFED-IBF 2016, which will be the sole event dedicated to industrial opportunities at ITER in 2016. The three-day conference will also feature an industrial and R&D exhibition. It is still possible to schedule one-to-one meetings (B2B and B2C). These networking opportunities facilitate the exploration of partnership opportunities in the context of the technological challenges that lie ahead for ITER. To schedule a one-to-one meeting or to ask for business appointments (based on company profiles), please consult the pages dedicated to registered participants here. In combining ITER Business Forum with the MIIFED international event, the MIIFED-IBF2016 Conference is specifically designed to support enhanced communication with industry and ensure that ITER procurement practices will be efficient and supportive of its industrial partners. It also aims to facilitate productive interaction between industry and fusion laboratories from the seven ITER Members and to foster collaboration between those actors, especially in technical areas where strong cooperation is required. See the conference website for more information or to register now.

Using Mira, physicists from Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have uncovered a new understanding about electron behaviour in edge plasma. Based on this discovery, improvements were made to a well-known analytical formula that could enhance predictions of and, ultimately, increase fusion power efficiency. Principal investigator C.S. Chang, head of the U.S. SciDAC-3 Partnership for Edge Physics Simulation headquartered at PPPL, and co-investigator Robert Hager recently gained new insight into the properties of a self-generating electrical current that boosts power in a tokamak fusion reactor, based on simulations run on the 10-petaflop IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer Mira located at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility in the US. To develop the best predictive tools for ITER (and, by extension, other experimental fusion reactors), research teams are using high-performance computing to resolve the behaviours of fusion plasma across the many spatial scales that impact reactor efficiency and plasma stability. Running on more than 260,000 Mira processing cores with excellent scalability, the latest XGCa plasma edge simulations revealed electron behaviours related to edge bootstrap current that are not accurately predicted for present-day tokamak geometry by the well-known Sauter formula, which is used to calculate values for the bootstrap current. "Mira allows running simulations of larger tokamaks at ITER's scale, and modeling at much higher particle counts more accurately represents the electron populations in the plasma," said Tim Williams, Argonne computational scientist. Read the full article on the website of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. Image: Based on a series of high-resolution simulations of bootstrap current in present-day tokamak geometries, researchers have modified a well-known formula that calculates the value of bootstrap current in order to improve the prediction of fusion efficiency in tokamak reactors. Credit: Kwan Liu-Ma, University of California, Davis.