Every human organization, whether family circle or megacorporation, needs people who can identify potential hurdles and work around them. At ITER, one of these "fixer" roles is held by Colette Ricketts and the other three members of the System Management Section she heads.

Colette, who wrote her PhD thesis on "Solid-state small particle magnetic systems," could have pursued a career in pure physics. However after working for a couple of years designing and maintaining laser interferometer systems for the JET and COMPASS tokamaks at UKAEA, she realized that she had an ability to sense why things sometimes take a wrong twist, and a natural skill for getting them fixed.

As she progressively moved from science and technology to the management and control of large UKAEA projects, organizational performance became her "core competence." Colette's reputation as a "fixer" was established.

After 18 years at UKAEA-Culham, she joined the ITER Project Office in 2011 and, as the Division was reorganized in early 2012, came up with a proposal for an improvement program modelled on what she had done at UKAEA.

At a time when ITER was facing multiple challenges, it was essential to improve the project's performance and efficiency. "I followed my usual sequence," Colette explains, "first working with senior managers to define what we were trying to achieve, then interviewing people at all levels of the Organization to identify and analyze the barriers that stand on the way to success."

In business parlance, this is called "root cause analysis." Basically it is attempting to identify what can be wrong in the way work is organized.

The initiative, which the ITER Director-General officially presented during an all-staff meeting on 23 January 2012 in Manosque, was given the catchy name "Improve(IT)².'' It called on staff members to continuously ask themselves whether they could streamline the way they perform their task: in Deputy Director-General Rich Hawryluk's words, "constantly looking for opportunities to simplify our procedures and practices."

Relying on Colette's System Management Section proactiveness as much as it does on the voluntary contributions of the ITER staff and collaborators, Improve(IT)² is both an attitude and a set of services that aim at providing near-term benefit while addressing the obstacles to success.

Each service emphasizes the need to respect colleagues and work together to find common solutions. "And there are always a million different ways to fix a problem," Colette assures.

Improve(IT)² services adapt and grow according to the needs of the workforce. Currently, they include an on-line Learning Centre, an Ideas Network and a Task Force process.

The Learning Centre is a web-based platform where the ITER Organization, the seven Domestic Agencies, and contractors can share their experience and learn from each other by posting videos with key information.

The Task Force process responds to input from the workforce and provides a method for constructively engaging ITER Organization and Domestic Agency personnel to solve common issues: improving the search tool in ITER's document management system IDM is one example of what an improvement task force can achieve.

The IDM built-in search system was complex, time-consuming and frustrating. What everyone aspired to was the simplicity and efficiency of a Google-like search engine. "All I was hearing was: sorry but it cannot be done! Well, we established a Task Force to tackle this issue and IT found a solution. The Google search engine is now available ..."

As for the Ideas Network, accessible through the ITER Intranet, it provides a mechanism for process owners (the people who develop the rules and tools) to obtain the benefit of user feedback. "The Network takes your suggestion or complaint and delivers it to the person who is in a position to address it. This is a very efficient system for people who have identified an issue but have no idea about who could solve it ..."

Several things are at stake in the Improve(IT)² approach: one, says Colette, is to deliver near-term benefits for the staff and for the Organization that will in turn encourage team behaviour; another is containing the cost of the project. "The network has been running since June and we've been getting an average of 15 ideas per month. The accepted suggestions are generating an estimated EUR 700,000 per year in productivity gains."

They are in their late twenties or early thirties and have already accumulated an impressive amount of experience in fusion research. Liu and Ma from China; Germàn from Spain; Pavel from Russia and Martin from Slovakia are the third promotion of the ITER Monaco Fellows. They belong to the generation of physicists and engineers that will see electricity from fusion energy fed into the grid.

At age 33 Martin Kocan is already an old hand at fusion, having spent eight years in fusion research, first in Prague and later at Tore Supra in France, where he did his PhD, and at ASDEX in Germany, where he worked three years as a postdoc. The list of his publications occupies more than three pages of his resume. At ITER, he will work with plasma physicist Steve Lisgo on plasma-wall interaction and, more specifically, on how the transport of H-localized mode and Edge Localized Modes affect the first wall of the tokamak.

Liu Feng will not need to move in order to work for ITER. She's been living in Aix-en-Provence for two years now, doing postdoc research on ITER scenarios at CEA Cadache's Research Institute on Magnetic Fusion (IRFM). Her new job at ITER will be to "contribute to finding solutions to stabilize the plasma," doing simulation work and" checking codes"".

Ma Yunxing was 19 when he arrived at MIT in 2006 to do his PhD in physics. Fusion was already a familiar world to him as he had taken his first course in plasma physics as a junior in college. A Chinese national like Liu, Ma had never been to Europe before joining ITER as a Monaco Fellow. He finds the atmosphere here in France "much more relaxed than in China or the US."

The first time Pavel Aleynikov encountered a tokamak was in his third year at Moscow's Institute of Physics and Technology. However it is not the machine (T-10) that decided his calling but the people who operated it. If T-10 didn't make "a strong impression" on him, the Tevatron at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Chicago, where he did a summer internship in 2008, certainly did. "I was very tempted to go into accelerators," he says. At ITER, he has found another team that he "liked at first sight." Pavel will be working with senior scientific officer Yuri Gribov on disruption simulation and runaway electrons.

With a PhD thesis on liquid metal-cooled Generation IV fission nuclear reactors and an advanced diploma in plasmas and nuclear fusion, Germàn Pérez is a young man of two worlds. His specialties extend to thermal engineering, power cycles and power systems. At ITER he will work in the Blanket Section on "defect acceptance criteria" in the machine's first wall.

Neutrons, along with electrons and X-ray, allow us to see inside matter. Since the wavelength of neutrons is similar to the distance between atoms, they can provide images of structure on an atomic scale. Neutron scattering is therefore an important tool for the provision of structural information on the atomic scale and for the understanding of dynamical properties of solids and liquids.

Quite a number of neutron sources exist around the world, with the most recent newcomer to the club and world leader in the supply of neutrons being the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) in the US. Now, a new project is about to change the "landscape of neutrons," as Juan Tomás Hernani reported in the most recent Inside ITER seminar last week. Hernani is the Secretary General for Innovation and Industry of the European Spallation Source (ESS) which is currently under development in southern Sweden. Thirty times more powerful than existing facilities and designed to operate in long pulses, the ESS will act as a kind of super microscope. Metaphorically speaking: if researchers have been studying materials under candlelight so far, the neutrons at ESS will provide the brilliance of floodlight.

 

Set up as a joint project of 17 European nations, the ESS at present has reached the critical planning phase for the instruments and components. Construction will begin in 2013 in Lund and the first neutrons together with the initial seven instruments will be available in 2019.  The remaining instruments will be completed by 2025, when the facility shall be fully operational. The total costs for planning, construction and operation of ESS are estimated at EUR 1.48 billion.

Click here to download Juan Tomás Hernani's presentation.

A new type of lecture series kicks off this week at ITER that aims to promote the sharing of expert knowledge of fusion, the ITER Tokamak, and its systems with the Organization's scientific and technical staff.

Modelled after science meetings held for many years at JET, the ITER Science and Technology Meetings have a threefold stated purpose: to intensify the Organization's academic atmosphere, to educate the younger members of staff, and to offer a forum for constructive peer criticism.

"Many of the younger scientists and technicians come from areas outside of fusion," explains Paul Thomas, head of the Heating & Current Drive Division, who is taking the lead in programming the lecture series. "We feel that it is important to diffuse the knowledge that is specific to the ITER project and bring everyone on board in the pursuit of our goal. It's good for an engineer, for example, to understand the 'larger picture' and have information beyond that of his or her specific equipment area."

The proposal for the new lecture series was approved by the ITER Project Board in December. A steering committee has been created to plan the lecture topics for the bi-monthly meetings and to make sure that the series remains focused on its goal: to offer high-quality, highly technical content in a one-hour session that is designed not to overtax already busy work schedules.

Each meeting will include two presentations plus time for discussion. The series begins on Tuesday 29 January with "What is a Tokamak" and "Superconductivity for Fusion." "This first meeting should be considered rather a prerequisite for all of the others, establishing the technical basis for ITER operation that will continue to be explored during the other lectures," says Paul. "We're hoping for excellent attendance, especially among the junior staff members."

The ITER Science and Technology Meetings will clearly demarcate themselves from ITER's other regular conference series, Inside ITER, which is aimed at a more general public. The speakers will come principally from the ranks of ITER Organization and Domestic Agency staff, with a few notable exceptions.  Jean-Luc Duchateau, who was involved with the development of the superconducting tokamak Tore Supra, and Peter Stott, co-author of Fusion: The Energy of the Universe, are already on the lecture series program.

A special session will be devoted annually to topics related to neutral beam heating in memory of ITER's Heating & Current Drive Division head Arturo Tanga, who died with his wife in a tragic accident in 2009. The first Arturo and Beatrice Tanga Memorial Talk is scheduled for 26 February 2013.

The new ITER lecture series aims to stand apart. "This bi-monthly event should not be considered 'just another meeting,'" sums up Paul. "It is a sign of maturity for an Organization when it can offer personal enrichment opportunities of this calibre."

From 16-20 September 2013, the 11th International Symposium on Fusion Nuclear Technology (ISFNT) will be held in Barcelona, Spain. The ISFNT is the international counterpart to the European SOFT and the American TOFE fusion technology conferences. The conference rotates through the different world regions—previous ISFNTs were held in Portland, US (2011), Dalian, China (2009), Heidelberg, Germany (2007) and Tokyo, Japan (2005).

The program committee is composed of members from ITER and the seven Members. The symposium focuses on both near-term fusion devices and long-term reactor technologies such as breeding blankets, neutron sources and hybrid reactors. There will also be a section devoted to inertial fusion technology.