It's only a one-page certificate but the symbolic value is strong. Delivered after three years of work and partnership with industry, the certificate confirms that a best-in-class safety programmable controller—the Siemens S7 400 F/FH range—is also suitable for the implementation of nuclear safety I&C functions in ITER at intermediate safety level "category C."   Although category C is not the highest safety level (category A is the highest) it represents by far the biggest number of safety signals and commands in the ITER safety instrumentation and control (I&C) system. That's about 20,000 pieces of information on the safety status of the ITER machine and on automatic or manual safety controls that must reach the operators in the control rooms to inform their decisions and actions.   For such a huge amount of information engineers rely on programmable controllers and network technologies, however this means using complex software that is difficult to test in an exhaustive way. But by implementing a stringent quality process, formalized lifecycle, robust design principles, and a comprehensive verification and validation process, software can be demonstrated to be suitable for some safety I&C applications. The rules for such certification are well defined in international standards, with detailed requirements for both classic industry and nuclear environments.   Looking for cost effectiveness, the ITER Organization selected best-in-class industrial products through international call for tender and is now performing the pre-qualification activities. The selected Siemens S7 400 F/FH range of programmable controllers was already certified as suitable for safety applications in industry (SIL3 according to IEC 615018)—now the bridge to certifying the software for nuclear safety I&C standard requirements had to be built. In the end, it took more than two years.The qualities that must be demonstrated for certification are related to the design and manufacturing of the products and the core know-how of the manufacturer. Along the way, it was necessary to build confidence with the manufacturer, including management, sales, R&D, quality assurance, and intellectual property teams. Non-Disclosure Agreements also had to be negotiated and signed. Siemens set up a specific organization to drive the process internally and sought out the right people for the job. It was then necessary to agree on the exact scope of the compliance demonstration and the level of detail. Would the demonstration be developed in house or would a third party be retained?   TÃœV Sud, a renowned certification body with expertise in nuclear applications, was finally selected by Siemens to assess the compliance of the S7 400 F/FH range to category C of the nuclear safety I&C standards. The ten-month certification process, which included the assessment of 85 documents and a three-day audit with 25 people in attendance, resulted in a 50-page qualification report and a final certificate of compliance.   The exercise demonstrated the importance of establishing a partnership with manufacturers when products need to be qualified for nuclear applications. The extensive involvement of Siemens France over three years and the collaboration of Siemens Germany for the last two was greatly appreciated.   Now that we have certification that the Siemens S7 400 F/FH range of programmable controllers is suitable for our applications, we are pursuing the effort to qualify the control logic hardware to the ITER environmental conditions. Ageing tests have already been performed and these will be followed by stringent electromagnetic compatibility tests—representative of lightning striking the buildings—and magnetic field tests. In 2016, the consortium Empresarios Agrupados/Inabensa will be charged with final seismic tests on full-size control logic cubicles.   Jean-Paul Vion and Michael Rosemeyer from Siemens collaborated on this article.

They are almost halfway through their two-year fellowships and all agree that in their respective fields, ITER is the place to be.  Under the postdoctoral fellowship Partnership Arrangement signed between the ITER Organization and the Principality of Monaco, five young scientists have been recruited every two years since 2009 to be trained, over a period of two years, in research areas related to ITER. In this framework, talented young scientists and engineers from the seven ITER Members plus Monaco have the opportunity to carry out advanced research in specialized areas of fusion science and technology. The five postdoctoral fellows selected in 2015 (the fourth group) come from China, Korea and the European Union. Chao Zhou is from China but he completed his PhD in superconducting applications and cryogenics in the Netherlands at the University of Twente.  His research focused on strain-reduced transport properties in superconducting materials for a joint project between Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the University of Twente. At ITER he joined the Superconductor Systems & Auxiliaries Section of the Magnet Division, where he works on the electromagnetic analysis of the ITER magnet system and on the magnet manufacturing database.  "It is a truly unique opportunity for me to thoroughly understand the R&D and production chain—from superconducting material, to strand, and all way to cable-in-conduit conductor—as well as production data tracking through the conductor and manufacturing databases," says Chao. "This time at ITER is an exceptional experience for me." After his Masters in nuclear engineering in Korea, Doohyun Kim spent five years in Switzerland where he obtained his PhD degree at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology EPFL in February 2015.  His main research topic was the real-time control of MHD (magnetohydrodynamic) instabilities. At ITER, he is working in the Stability & Control Section of the Science & Operations Department, where he focuses on the advanced plasma control system, principally in the domain of actuator sharing. His work includes the development of an actuator management (sharing) algorithm and the application of the control system in existing tokamaks to validate its feasibility. Christian Vorpahl from Germany graduated from Karlsruhe University (KIT today) and the French Engineering School ENSAM. He majored in analytical mechanics and fusion technology and his diploma thesis focused on the microstructure property correlation of Eurofer steel, the European candidate structural material for the next-phase device DEMO. Christian earned his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) working on the ASDEX Upgrade tokamak where he built a measurement system for in-service deformations, which mainly occur as a result of plasma disruptions and AC operation of the internal coils. He worked as a postdoc at IPP in the European Domestic Agency project for the development of the ITER diagnostic pressure gauge for one year before joining ITER. In the ITER Diagnostics Division, Christian is taking care of the global coordination of the development of diagnostic shutters. Close to the plasma, these shutters will protect optical diagnostics' first mirrors, mainly from excessive deposition, and thereby ensure the functioning of the diagnostic.  Approximately 60 shutters will be required by up to 20 different diagnostic systems. Christian also contributes to the development of cleaning systems for diagnostic mirrors, which is closely related to the context of shutters, and provides support to the pressure gauge development at ITER as well as to diagnostic port plug engineering. "I couldn't have such a diverse fusion-related work experience anywhere but at ITER," says Christian. "For me it's a dream come true." For Stephanie Panayotis, from France, working in a pluricultural and pluridisciplinary project has always been an objective.  She specialized in thermonuclear fusion and its interaction with surrounding materials and then completed a PhD at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), working on the Tore Supra tokamak in the frame of the international project DITS (deuterium Inventory in Tore Supra). She focused on fuel retention and succeeded in building a global description of the fuel cycle in carbon plasma-facing components by combining experimental and modelling results. At ITER, Stephanie has now joined the tungsten divertor team, in charge of the component that will receive the largest heat fluxes from the plasma. She is working on the characterization program that will provide major information on the properties of tungsten and ensure that the required material specification will be met during production to avoid damage during the ITER operation. Wouter Dekeyser, from Belgium, earned his PhD at Katholieke Universiteit (KU) Leuven in early 2014. As a computational engineer, his PhD research focused on the development of advanced algorithms for automated divertor design based on edge plasma simulations, using efficient adjoint techniques for sensitivity analysis. He then held a postdoctoral researcher position throughout most of 2014 at the Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany, where he worked on hybrid fluid-kinetic neutral  gas models for edge plasma simulations before joining the ITER Organization. As part of the Divertor Section at ITER, Wouter now works on a new version of the SOLPS-ITER code package, the edge plasma simulation tool used throughout the fusion community that is being developed at the ITER Organization with the support of colleagues within the ITER partners. "It is an honour and a pleasure to work with and learn from leading scientists in my field every day and to be able contribute to one of the most challenging energy projects of our time," says Wouter.

The French Nuclear Safety Authority (Autorité de Sûreté Nucléaire, ASN) regularly asks the nuclear operators in France to present an overview of the status of their installation in terms of nuclear safety and radiation protection.  This consultation is requested and carried out by an independent board of commissioners (le Collège).    In this context, ITER Director-General Bernard Bigot and the head of the Nuclear Safety & Environmental Protection Division, Joelle Elbez-Uzan, met with the ASN Collège on 6 January 2016. They reported on the changes in project organization since the arrival of the new Director-General, the progress of the ITER construction site, and major future milestones.   The ASN acknowledged the efforts of ITER Organization to improve the monitoring of external contractors and to establish a safety culture since the previous interview of ITER management in July 2014. The ASN will continue to pay particular attention to these topics in the months to come.   Progress of R&D work with respect to safety was also noted, as well as actions that remain to be completed, in particular on detritiation. On the subject of radioactive waste, the ITER Organization is studying several options for radwaste optimization, interim storage, and cooling either in the facility or off-site; the Organization plans to submit the selected options to the ASN at the end of 2016. The ASN Collège has requested that technical discussions on these subjects be organized in 2016.   The ASN took note of project delays—some of several years—which so far have not impacted the safety of the facility. The ASN has asked the ITER Organization to commit to a new detailed schedule for reporting, in line with the revised project schedule.

The delegation from the Chinese Ministry of Science & Technology (MOST) that was received at ITER on 26 January also paid a visit to the International School in the neighbouring town of Manosque. Headed by Luo Delong, head of the Chinese Domestic Agency for ITER, and Sun Yuming, Deputy Director-General of the Executive Office at MOST, the delegation had a gift for the students in the Chinese section: four boxes of textbooks for primary school classes and picture books for pre-schoolers. Of the 34 students in the Chinese section 21 are "ITER children"; the others are French nationals learning Chinese as second foreign language.

The MAST Upgrade vacuum vessel is getting a paint job — and its new look will ensure the experiment produces top-quality plasma physics data when it starts operating next year. While it's a shame to cover up the gleaming stainless steel surfaces, science must take precedence over aesthetic considerations. A number of key measuring systems — diagnostics — on MAST-U will rely on accurate readings of light from the plasma. With uncovered steel, the light bounces off the vessel surfaces, playing havoc with the measurements. Reflected light also makes it more difficult to examine images of the plasma for physics phenomena such as ELM instabilities. Applying graphite-based paint to the walls greatly reduces these reflections, giving physicists much better results to work with. Read the whole article at CCFE.

One of the biggest obstacles to making fusion power practical—and realizing its promise of virtually limitless and relatively clean energy—has been that computer models have been unable to predict how the hot, electrically charged gas inside a fusion reactor behaves under the intense heat and pressure required to make atoms stick together. The key to making fusion work—that is, getting atoms of a heavy form of hydrogen called deuterium to stick together to form helium, releasing a huge amount of energy in the process—is to maintain a sufficiently high temperature and pressure to enable the atoms overcome their resistance to each other. But various kinds of turbulence can stir up this hot soup of particles and dissipate some of the intense heat, and a major problem has been to understand and predict exactly how this turbulence works, and thus how to overcome it. A long-standing discrepancy between predictions and observed results in test reactors has been called "the great unsolved problem" in understanding the turbulence that leads to a loss of heat in fusion reactors. Solving this discrepancy is critical for predicting the performance of new fusion reactors such as the huge international collaborative project called ITER, under construction in France. Now, researchers at MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center, in collaboration with others at the University of California at San Diego, General Atomics, and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, say that they have found the key. In a result so surprising that the researchers themselves found it hard to believe their own results at first, it turns out that interactions between turbulence at the tiniest scale, that of electrons, and turbulence at a scale 60 times larger, that of ions, can account for the mysterious mismatch between theory and experimental results. The new findings are detailed in a pair of papers published in the journals Nuclear Fusion and AIP Physics of Plasmas, by MIT research scientist Nathan Howard, doctoral student Juan Ruiz Ruiz, Cecil and Ida Green Associate Professor in Engineering Anne White, and 12 collaborators. See the original story on MIT News. Photo courtesy of the researchers.

The Kudowa Summer School "Towards Fusion Energy" takes place every two years in Kudowa Zdrój, Poland.Organized by the Institute of Plasma Physics and Laser Microfusion (IPPLM) and the International Centre for Dense Magnetised Plasma (ICDMP), the summer program is geared toward a multinational audience, principally PhD students but also Master's students and young scientists from all over Europe. Courses focus on various aspects of fusion energy, plasma experiments, plasma modelling and technology for young scientists from different countries. The subject of the Kudowa Summer School in 2016 is: Power Exhaust in Fusion Plasmas. The 2016 Kudowa Summer School will take place from 13 to 17 June 2016 (registration deadline 20 March). For more information, visit the dedicated website.