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The design of ITER's Cooling Water System is maturing. The system, consisting of the Tokamak Cooling Water System (TCWS), the Component Cooling Water System (CCWS), the Chilled Water System (CHWS) and the Heat Rejection System (HRS), is responsible for removing the enormous amounts of heat generated by the tokamak and its auxiliary systems, with an anticipated peak heat load of more than 1100 MW.
Over the course of the past year, some impressive progress has been made on many pending issues enabling the teams to take the design of these crucial components from their conceptual design to the next level. The formal preliminary design review for the Tokamak Cooling Water System (TCWS) was completed last month on 20-22 March in Cadarache with more than 20 participants from the US Domestic Agency and its contractor AREVA Federal Services LLC. The following week, the expert group for the Heat Rejection System (HRS), another essential part of ITER's cooling system that is supplied by the Indian Domestic Agency, moved in.
The TCWS preliminary design improved the operation and safety of the primary thermal management system. Pathways for the discharge of radioactively contaminated water to the environment were eliminated. Four separate cooling systems for the first wall/blanket and divertor were combined into a single system to improve operational flexibility and system availability. Significant progress was reported on the design of supporting systems such as the chemical and volume control, drying, and draining. "In fact, the TCWS design is now 65 percent complete and is documented in 116 reports and drawings, a comprehensive 3D Design Model with 56 work packages, and 44 interface sheets," states Jan Berry, US team leader of the Tokamak Cooling Water System.
At this phase of TCWS design development, the expertise and advice from the power producing industry is crucial as the ITER Organization/US Domestic Agency/industry team comprised of more than 100 engineers and designers is responsible for developing the final design and ultimately the fabrication and delivery of the components.
"AREVA has designed and built many cooling water systems for reactors," Joe Stringer, vice president at AREVA Federal Services LLC replied when asked about the challenges the full-service nuclear provider faces working on the ITER fusion reactor. "However there are design features for the ITER project which make the design solution unique. The TCWS has more interfaces with other design organizations than any other system and at the same time the project requires completion of the design and delivery of the piping and components on a very aggressive schedule. But AREVA is very proud to be part of the ITER team and we are committed to meeting the significant challenges ahead."
For the team in charge of HRS design the cyclic nature of the ITER machine presented the most distinct challenge. "The HRS must reject normal facility heat loads plus large intermittent heat loads from the pulsed operations of the tokamak while maintaining stable and predictable cooling water basin temperatures to meet the needs of the cooling water system clients," explains Steve Ployhar, responsible officer for the Heat Rejection System. "It would have been easy to size the cooling towers based on peak conditions, but this solution would have been unacceptable in regards to the use of resources, both in terms of capital cost and space on the site."
The challenge for the design team was therefore to meet the heat rejection needs while minimizing the cost and the footprint of the cooling towers. Part of the solution proposed by the Indian Domestic Agency involves the construction of an additional hot basin and associated pumps to absorb the hot water generated during the "burn" phase of the plasma pulse and discharge it to the cooling tower at a constant rate throughout the plasma pulse cycle, thus making more efficient use of the cooling towers. This solution will guarantee the reliability of the system and will keep the additional footprint to 50 percent of what would have been required otherwise.
 
"The cooling water systems interface with virtually all ITER systems and facilities and their successful design involves coordination as well as technical challenges. The outcome of the preliminary design reviews for TCWS and HRS give us confidence that these challenges are being met," concludes Giovanni Dell Orco, leader of the ITER Cooling Water System Section.
Sekhar Basu, chief executive at the Department of Atomic Energy in India and chairman of the Design Review, also expressed his confidence that the design for the ITER's Heat Rejection System provided enough flexibility for the varying load conditions. "We will resolve the remaining interface and environmental issues for this system judiciously in order to allow the project to move forward in a time- and cost-effective manner."

Coming soon to a TV set near you: Program #7 of the ITER series produced by local channel Télé Locale Provence (TLP).

After an interruption of more than two years, ITER and TLP are resuming their collaboration. Journalist Sébastien Galaup and cameraman Pierre-Paul Giudicelli were back on site last week—despite some heavy rain—to film and tape interviews on construction progress.
The program, complete with the pair's trademark (and often hilarious) "street interviews," will be aired in the coming weeks on the Digital Terrestrial Network (TNT) that covers the whole of the Durance River Valley; on satellite TV; and also through the Orange, SFR and Numericable Internet TV service.

We'll keep you posted ...

"Magnetar," a concerto for electric cello by Mexican composer Enrico Chapela, did in fact recently have its premiere in the USA, but exerpts had previously been heard at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Garching. Young cello virtuoso Johannes Moser had chosen the ASDEX Upgrade fusion device as backdrop for a music video.
Where the concern otherwise is to investigate how to ignite the fire of the sun in a power plant here on earth, Johannes Moser presented fascinating sound patterns with a three-hundred-year old Guarneri cello and its modern electric counterpart. But there is actually a connection: As Chapela explains, it was stars, magnetars to be more precise—neutron stars with particularly strong magnetic fields—that provided the inspiration for his composition. After the Garching intermezzo the complete work had its world premiere in Los Angeles on 20 October 2011 with Johannes Moser and the Los Angeles Philharmonics, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel.
Click here to watch the video.

From 20-22 March 2012, more than 20 participants from the ITER Organization, the US Domestic Agency (US-DA), plus outside experts contributed to an in-depth review of the preliminary design of the ITER Tokamak Cooling Water System (see report in this issue). This short video provides an overview of a 3D model of the system's preliminary design, which was completed by the US-DA with oversight by the ITER Organization. In order to remove heat from the plasma as well as provide draining, drying and gas baking which support maintenance and reduce impurities in the vacuum vessel wall, the Tokamak Cooling Water System interfaces with the majority of ITER systems.
We'd like to thank Jan Berry and Lynne Degitz from the US ITER Project Office in Oak Ridge for taking the lead in producing this video.
For more information on the ITER Cooling Water System click here.

Twenty-seven years after the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, met on the Swiss shore of Lake Geneva to agree on an international effort to develop fusion energy "as an inexhaustible source of energy for the benefit of mankind," the ITER project—born that day—entered the stage again.
The International Congress on Energy Security in Geneva last week attracted the representatives of many organizations and institutions that either analyze energy demand or are very directly involved in its supply. The stakes are high—a point stressed by every speaker during this two-day event.
"The era of cheap and abundant energy is soon ending," said ITER Director-General Osamu Motojima, who had been invited to deliver the keynote speech. "The advantages of fusion energy, although not easy to achieve, are considerable. The universal availability of the fusion fuels will contribute to easing the international tensions that energy supply and demand currently generate."
"Energy security, is, in all its aspects, a key issue for the international community," UN under-secretary-general Kassym-Jomart Tokayev added in his opening remarks. "International organizations, industry, civil society, and governments must partner to meet this challenge, so that the vast opportunities of the modern world are available to everybody. And, of course, for these opportunities to be truly available to everybody they must be approached in a sustainable fashion."
One of the major questions addressed at this energy summit was the future of nuclear energy. Where and how will nuclear energy position itself in the new world order that was shaped on 11 March 2011? "Fukushima changed it all," said Hans Püttgen, director of the Energy Center in Lausanne. "The race to get out of nuclear first is on."
Taking a look at the nuclear issue from a very French angle was Jacques Attali, President of PlaNet and special advisor to the former French President Francois Mitterand. "Nuclear here in France represents an important portion of the energy mix and a rapid pull-out would consequently mean a steep increase in the price of electricity." However, Attali added, the Fukushima disaster had shown that there was still a "certain lack of transparency" when discussing nuclear issues.
In such a context Oliver Steinmetz, one of the founding fathers of Desertec, presented one of the world's most ambitious solar initiatives, whose aim it is to generate and transmit solar power from the world's deserts. Driven by the maxim that within six hours the deserts receive more energy from the sun than humankind consumes in a year, industrial partners in Europe, the Middle East, and North African are collaborating to build solar power stations.
 
Another highlight of this Energy Security Conference was the presentation of Bertrand Piccard, son of the famous deep-sea explorer Jacques Piccard and the first man ever to circumnavigate the world in a hot-air balloon. With his Solar Impulse project, Bertrand Piccard proved that it was possible to fly night and day for more than 26 hours without fuel, powered only by solar energy. When asked about his motivation for seeing the project through against all odds, Bertrand Piccard replied: "Our best allies are those who tell us that our undertaking is impossible."

Fusion energy progress by Livermore scientists
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However, many of the technologies needed for an integrated inertial fusion energy system are still at an early stage of technological maturity," the committee said in a statement. "For all approaches to inertial fusion energy there remain critical ...

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There was a definite classroom atmosphere last week in meeting room 519/110, as young engineers from the Indian and Korean Domestic Agencies, along with staff from a Chinese company involved in the ITER coils' power supply, were getting acquainted with the CODAC Core System, the software toolkit supplied by the ITER Organization for creating plant system instrumentation and control (I&C).

As hands were politely raised, instructors went from one student to the other explaining functions and detailing the software's options. The ten students who participated in this four-day training session will soon be using the software "for real" as they will all be directly involved in the procurement of I&C equipment for the ITER plant systems.
The CODAC Core System is a software package that is made available to all users who contribute to the development of the various ITER instrumentation and control systems. It is based on the widely-used EPICS open-source software—a favourite among large research installations such as the Korean tokamak KSTAR, the German synchrotron DESY and the Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the US.
Also included in the package (and in the training program) are ITER-developed configuration tools and software components to support hardware standards.
In order to make the training as realistic as possible the students' laptops were connected to the technical room one floor below, where electronic controllers and "looped signals" mimicked the behaviour of actual I&C equipment.

Training sessions began in 2011 and will be organized on a monthly basis throughout the coming years. Franck Di Maio, the CODAC Core System integrator and session organizer, expects to train 70 to 80 people from the ITER Domestic Agencies and industry this year.

Counting the number of neutrons produced by fusion reactions inside a burning plasma gives a precise indication of how much fusion power is being generated.
But how do you count neutrons?
Previously, fusion installations such as TFTR in the US, JET in Europe and JT-60 in Japan have relied on a device based on the physics of fission: the fission chamber.
A fission chamber is a gas-filled container, whose walls are coated with a thin layer of fissile material such as uranium 235 (U235). When a neutron hits an atom of fissile material the atom splits and a fixed amount of energy is released. Measuring the total energy that is released within the device gives a clear indication of how many neutrons have hit the U235 layer. The number of neutrons, in turn, reveals the quantity of fusion power produced.
In previous tokamaks, fission chambers were rather large and installed outside the vacuum vessel. In ITER, their size will not exceed that of a pencil—hence the term "micro fission chamber."
Four units—containing three micro fission chambers each—will be fitted into the gap between the blanket shield modules and the vacuum vessel. The units' locations have been carefully chosen so that the incoming neutrons can be monitored in all circumstances, whatever the plasma position.
Operating in a burning plasma environment, the ITER micro fission chambers will be necessarily different from those installed in previous fusion machines. Vacuum is one the design challenges: since the argon-filled "pencils" will be placed inside the vacuum vessel, they must be perfectly leak-proof. Temperature must also be taken into consideration, as the vacuum vessel will be "baked" to a temperature of 200° C prior to plasma shots.
Previous tokamaks did not operate with the fusion fuels deuterium and tritium (or only very briefly). ITER will produce long-duration plasma discharges, submitting the micro fission chambers, like all in-vessel components, to an intense neutron flux.
"The technology is challenging but feasible," says Luciano Bertalot, technical responsible officer for the Micro Fission Chamber Procurement Arrangement signed last week. "The system is designed to hold for the twenty years of ITER operation time. It is 'redundant,' which means that even if one of micro fission chamber units fails, we will still be able to measure neutron emission and evaluate the fusion power that ITER produces."
The Procurement Arrangement documents for the ITER micro fission chambers were signed last Wednesday 28 March by the ITER Organization and countersigned by the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) on 4 April. "We are looking forward to making this project a reality," said Yoshinori Kusama, head of diagnostics at the Japanese Domestic Agency (JA-DA) on this occasion.
Staff members from the JA-DA took an active part in the Concept Design phase that preceded the signature. Now, the R&D and prototype development phase will begin in Japan.

An international working group coordinated by Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany, has completed a new mirror system for ITER ... and for its successors. The system—referred to as a "mirror station"—has shutters that open and close automatically to protect optical components from being contaminated by particle flows in the vacuum vessel. The researchers have been testing the practical applicability of the module at the US research reactor DIII-D in San Diego since mid-March.
Optical diagnostics are indispensable for nuclear fusion experiments. The light produced in a plasma speaks volumes about its properties, such as its composition and the concentration of various isotopes and elements. Due to the intense neutron radiation, it will only be possible to observe the light indirectly, using mirror systems positioned at the plasma edge. In this zone, however, the mirrors are exposed to contamination from beryllium and tungsten particles removed from the wall materials during contact with the hot plasma.
The new mirror system for ITER has fast shutters made of monocrystalline molybdenum, which only uncover the mirror during the main phase of the plasma pulse. The shutters thus protect the sensitive optical components when the plasma is ignited, as the risk of contamination is at its highest during this phase. Since the very strong magnetic fields in the vacuum vessel interfere with electrical circuits, Jülich's mirror station relies entirely on passive control. An additional magnetic field component is utilized for this purpose. It emerges as soon as the tokamak plasma ignites and it acts on a magnetic ferrite core in the "mirror station" which passively opens the protective shutters.
"We have already tested electromagnetic loading of the system in a tokamak environment and used software codes developed at Jülich to minimize the release of contaminating atoms and their redeposition on the mirror surfaces. We believe that our development will make a very substantial contribution to making optical measurements possible at ITER ," says project head Dr. Andrey Litnovsky at Jülich's Institute of Energy and Climate Research. After DIII-D, the practical applicability of Jülich's "mirror station" will be put to the test at the Chinese fusion experiment EAST in Hefei, at the ASDEX Upgrade operated by the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Garching near Munich, Germany, and at Jülich's TEXTOR Tokamak.
Further information on fusion research at Forschungszentrum Jülich can be found here.

For a high-school student in rural Korea in the 1970s, the opportunity of attending the University of Seoul seemed an impossible dream. But Joo Shik Bak was one of the lucky ones. Determination, grades, and the encouragement of a very remarkable teacher helped to earn him admittance into the engineering program in 1975.
Some 35 years—and the construction of four enormous scientific machines—later, JS Bak was preparing to take up new duties as ITER project Chief Engineer in April.
"I'm a rather conservative man," says Bak during a February visit to ITER. "My training as an engineer has helped me in the management tasks that I faced during my career. Engineering is a school of clear decision-making that goes hand-in-hand with business matters such as cost management, schedule deadlines and performance."
Bak was in charge of the ion source and accelerator tube for Korea's first DC accelerator (the 1.5 MV Tandem Van de Graaff Accelerator, completed in 1982). From 1983 to 1990 he built a medical cyclotron and a medical microtron at the Korea Cancer Center Hospital and was in charge of operations. Over the next 10 years he oversaw the development of the 2 GeV Electron Linear Accelerator, insertion devices and beamlines at the Pohang Synchrotron Light Source. And in 2001 he took on the challenge of developing the KSTAR Tokamak's main structures (vessel, cryostat, thermal shields, magnets...), including overseeing the manufacturing of the 30 superconducting magnets and their feeders.
With the achievement of First Plasma in 2008, the KSTAR Tokamak took its place in history as the first niobium-tin (Nb3Sn) superconducting tokamak in the world.
"I have always felt a strong responsibility for nuclear fusion. I have been involved with many large fusion R&D machines; still, we do not yet have fusion energy for the public. My principal motive in joining the ITER project is to work toward this goal for the next generation." In recognition of his role in the construction of four one-of-a-kind devices in Korea, Bak was awarded the Hyeoksin ("innovation") Medal, Order of Science and Technology Merit, by the Korean government in 2009.
At ITER, Bak will support ITER Deputy Director-General Rem Haange, head of the Project Department, by identifying and solving issues that could potentially cause delay in manufacturing. "My experience allows me to say—ahead of time—that it will be necessary to work with the heart and not only brains," warns Bak. "Attitude counts for a lot in a project like this. Each one of us should feel a huge responsibility."
He has been closely associated with the ITER project since 2005 as a member of the Korean delegation to the ITER Science and Technology Advisory Committee. He has also filled the role of deputy Director-General and chief engineer of the Korean Domestic Agency for ITER.
"Where there is no ingenuity there is no achievement, and where there is no achievement there is no real happiness," he concludes. "If we believe in ITER's success, our project will not fail."

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A hot plasma is a bit like a star: it gives out light all across the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves all the way through X-rays to gamma rays.
When astrophysicists want to know what happens inside a star—how hot it is, what elements it is composed of—they use a spectrometer. A fusion physicist does exactly the same with a fusion plasma.
The light spectrum carries a considerable amount of information. Aim the proper spectrometer toward a region of the plasma and it will tell you how many impurities are present, how the temperature varies, and how fast the tenuous gas rotates.
The Edge Imaging X-ray Spectrometer that the Indian Domestic Agency will procure for ITER will be a valuable diagnostic tool. Last Wednesday, 28 March, the Procurement Arrangement documents were signed by Director-General Motojima; this Monday the documents will be countersigned by ITER-India Project Director Shishir Deshpande.
 
The Edge Imaging X-ray Spectrometer is one of three X-ray subsystems that will look at different regions of the ITER plasma in order to provide accurate measurements of their behaviour and performance. It is a vacuum-coupled, multi-channel device that sits behind a port plug and will have a very narrow, direct line of sight to the upper edge region of the D-shaped plasma.
This first diagnostics Procurement Arrangement signed with India is an exemplary one. The whole process was a close collaboration between ITER and the Indian Domestic Agency which sent several staff members for long periods to Cadarache, creating strong bonds between the institutions. "Working with the ITER team has been a great pleasure," says Sanjeev Varshney, technical responsible officer at the Indian Domestic Agency.
Dhiraj Bora, head of the Directorate for CODAC, Heating & Diagnostics, was present on Wednesday along with Diagnostics Division Head Mike Walsh, ITER Technical Responsible Officer Robin Barnsley, and one of the young Indian Domestic Agency staff members presently working at ITER, Dilshad Sulaiman.

Moving into a new office building can be as exciting as moving into a new house. You look at the blueprints, browse the photo albums and imagine how different your life—or work—will be in a new environment.
ITER staff members experienced some of this excitement last Thursday 29 March as Tim Watson, head of Buildings & Site Infrastructure, took the Inside ITER audience on a virtual tour of the new ITER Headquarters—part of it in 3D.
Tim started with the story of the building's genesis, beginning in 1998 when it was referred to as the Laboratory Office Building. It was originally designed to accommodate 750 people ... then it was "significantly shrunk" in 2004 to provide workspace for about 200 permanent and 100 visiting staff ... then resized again to fit ITER's anticipated needs, and budget.
The architectural approach has also changed over time. Back in 2004, the ITER Organization planned a no-thrill design, "comparable with [that of] industrial or commercial support facilities." Four years later, the tide had changed and a young and daring Marseille architect, Rudy Ricciotti, won the architectural competition organized by Agence Iter France and the European Domestic Agency.
The building Ricciotti and his local partner Laurent Bonhomme designed is functional with a touch of originality. All offices come with floor-to-ceiling windows; those on the northwest side opening to a magnificent landscape of wooded hills and Provençal villages, while those on the other side have a no-less-impressive view of the ITER installations.

Five-storey light shafts running the length of the building will bring natural light to every floor. A large wooden terrace, directly connected to the cafeteria, will offer the permanent temptation of a quick stroll or a coffee break.

The building will provide office space for 500 staff and contractors, but discussions are already ongoing about an extension for an extra 350 people.
Moving day is scheduled in October. Once the ITER Headquarters building is complete, no staff member or contractor will remain on the CEA site. ITER will be at home in its own enclosure, part of the staff moving to Headquarters, others to the present temporary office buildings.

It was an odd-looking procession that made its way through the ancient streets of Ghent last Friday. About 100 men and women lined up in twos and dressed in long black robes and velvet hats walking with great dignity towards the auditorium of the city's university, which was founded in 1817 by William I, King of the Netherlands. Today Ghent is the capital and largest city of Belgium's east Flanders region (see textbox).
The procession is part of a long-standing tradition that precedes Ghent University's dies natalis ceremony. Last week seven outstanding scientists, among them ITER Director-General Osamu Motojima, received the honorary doctorate degree. "ITER is a unique and highly challenging project," the head of the university's fusion branch and coordinator of the European fusion education program, Guido van Oost, said in his laudation, which he gave in Flemish. "Your determination has put the ITER train back on track. The torch that was lit thirty years ago by the first generation of fusion scientists is in good hands. By bringing a sun to Cadarache, you are working to shape a better future for our children and grandchildren, and for many generations to come."
_To_33_Tx_In addition to the ITER Director-General, the honoris causa title was awarded to Paula Semer, presenter and producer of many emancipatory broadcasting programs and a Belgian "institution"; to Masatoshi Takeichi from the University in Kobe, Japan, for his pioneering work on the key role of specific intercellular adhesion in morphogenesis; to the Dutch researcher Désirée van der Heijde for pioneering work that has helped to improve the quality of life of patients suffering from rheumatoid arthritis; to Arnoud De Meyer, rector of the Singapore Management University; to Paul Sackett from the University of Minnesota, a leading authority in the field of human resources management; and finally to the Dutch researcher Saskia Sassen, author of the book The Global City, a highly original sociology of globalization.
The last word of the ceremony, the acceptance speech, was given by Arnoud De Meyer who thanked Ghent University and Rector Paul Van Cauwenberge on behalf of the seven laureates. "We are truly grateful for this honorary title which we also accept on behalf of our teams and—not to forget—our families. Without them a successful scientific career is not possible."
Click here to see the photo gallery of the event posted on the University of Ghent website.

The Max Planck Society is strengthening its commitment to the development of a sustainable energy supply and has joined forces with internationally renowned Princeton University to establish the Max Planck Princeton Research Centre for Plasma Physics.
Shirley M. Tilghman, the president of Princeton University, and Peter Gruss, president of the Max Planck Society, signed the agreement for the establishment of the new research centre on the Princeton University campus on 29 March 2012. On that occasion Peter Gruss stressed: "It is essential that we pool our strengths and knowledge in the field of fusion research in particular, so that we can develop nuclear fusion into something the world urgently needs for the years and decades to come: safe, clean and dependable energy technology."
The new centre's partners in the field of fusion research are the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Garching and Greifswald (IPP) and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL). In the field of astrophysical plasmas, the MPI for Solar System Research (Katlenburg-Lindau), the MPI for Astrophysics (Garching) and Princeton University's Department for Astrophysical Sciences are also involved. "The aim of the cooperation is to make greater use of the synergies between fusion research and the work carried out by the astrophysicists," explains Sibylle Günter, Director of the MPI for Plasma Physics. For example, it has emerged that many methods developed by fusion research are also applicable for astrophysics. It is also intended to apply insights into fusion and astrophysical plasmas to the further development of theoretical models, and thereby advance the research on fusion power as an energy source suitable for practical, everyday use.
Sibylle Günter from the MPI for Plasma Physics, Stewart Prager from the PPPL and Jim Stone from the Department for Astrophysical Sciences form the Leading Team of the Max Planck Princeton Centre. Also involved are IPP Directors Per Helander and Thomas Klinger, Sami Solanki from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and Simon White from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics.
All of the partners on both the German and American sides have extensive experience in the fields of fusion research and astrophysics, and complement each other in different ways. The IPP is working on a tokamak experiment in Garching, which is based on the design of ITER. The IPP researchers are also building the Wendelstein 7-X Stellarator in Greifswald, and the PPPL has already contributed hardware for this project. Given that the PPPL is very interested in stellarator physics but is not carrying out an experiment of its own in this area, Günter assumes that this cooperation will intensify further with the establishment of the new centre. The PPPL, which is the leading institute in the field of fusion research in the US, operates a spherical tokamak and carries out laboratory experiments on general plasma physics, a topic that is also researched in Greifswald. The partners from the Max Planck Society and Princeton University would like to avail one another of their respective experimental systems and develop new theoretical models and codes in the context of the new centre.
The Max Planck Princeton Research Centre for Plasma Physics will promote the exchange of scientists, in particular junior scientists. To this effect, the scientists could cooperate on an experiment campaign at the corresponding institute or work jointly on the development of computer programs.
The new centre is one of ten Max Planck Centres that are currently being established at nine locations throughout the world.

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In a 3D video experience, the most striking image is not always on the screen. This photo was taken at the last Inside ITER seminar as the audience watched a 3D video tour of the future ITER Headquarters.

With the decision to build ITER, the development of nuclear fusion a sustainable energy source has accelerated. The field attracts more and more engineers, perfectly capable of their engineering job, but often lacking the deeper insights into the broader fusion physics challenges at play. Opportunities for education and training are scarce and mainly focused upon the PhD level in university, or dedicated summer schools which addressed specific research issues.
With this in mind, the Fusion Academy offers a three-day crash course in the science and technology of nuclear fusion. In collaboration with Eindhoven University of Technology, the Fusion Academy has developed a unique program adapted to professionals in fusion R&D.
The course promotes interactive teaching and for that reason the group will be limited to 6-12 persons. The first event is scheduled for 20-22 June, 2012 near Eindhoven, the Netherlands. More information can be found at http://www.fusionacademy.eu/ or can be received by sending an email to: info@fusionacademy.eu.

Remote handling will be used to perform maintenance tasks on the machine and machine components; in a complex plant like ITER, this remote maintenance is fundamentally a manual activity. Operators in charge of remote handling operations will work from two dedicated areas on the ITER site:  the Remote Handling Control Room for remote operations in and around the machine and the Hot Cell Operations Control Room for remote handling within Hot Cell Facility.

The ITER maintenance campaigns will involve carrying out a set of tasks within a fixed period by the remote handling operations team. The policy of the Remote Handling Section is to organize the control rooms into standard work cells which can be easily configured for the execution of the particular tasks required for the shutdown.

Standardization in the remote handling control room is critical for the safe and efficient execution of remote handling operations. To promote standardization across a wide range of maintenance tasks, a contract was placed with Jacobs Engineering UK Limited for the implementation of a standard remote handling control room work cell. The effort, launched in July 2011, brought together specialists in remote handling (Oxford Technologies), robotics (Intermodalics), and human factors engineering (CCD, UK).

The standard work cell, which complies with ITER's high-level control system architecture, has been implemented in a dedicated room on the Oxford Technologies premises. To simulate operations, remote handling equipment controller software was developed according to the standard model with emulation of the control of real remote handling equipment. Wherever possible, recommended standard parts were used and validated in the work cell. Within this facility, the goal was to demonstrate that standard solutions can be applied to the ITER remote handling tasks; for each task demonstration, a wide variety of remote handling tools was simulated.

The standard work cell has been applied to execute three typical ITER remote handling tasks in simulation: the removal of the neutral beam cesium oven (demonstration of a neutral beam task); the de-contamination of a divertor cassette in a cleaning cell (demonstration of a Hot Cell Facility task); and the removal of a central divertor cassette (demonstration of an in-vessel task).

The simulations have shown that a standard remote handling work cell can be used for a range of ITER remote handling tasks. The team was able to demonstrate the viability of various standard parts: master arm, joysticks, emergency stops, virtual reality, communication middleware, and communication protocol. The standard work cell also demonstrated a workable layout that took "human factors engineering" into account.

The success of ITER operations will depend on the ability to remotely access and maintain critical components. This successful "proof-of-concept" work cell has demonstrated that ITER Organization standards are valid solutions for ITER remote handling.