The new year started with snow and record temperatures. Hiroshi Matsumoto and Mingxing Su were amongst the ITER staff enjoying the rare chance to build a provençal snowman.
Open Sesame - Alain LeBris, ITER Safety Officer and Bruno Coutourier, in charge of the installation of the Roto-Gate on behalf of Agence Iter France, were the first to walk through the new gate in January.
For the second time, ITER was at the polls in 2009: Jerry Sovka, Head of the Civil Engineering Department, gives his vote for the election of the Staff Committee.
HSH Prince Albert II meets the ITER Monaco Post Doctoral Fellows in February. Left to right: David Campbell, Pascal Amenc-Antoni, Neil Calder, Kaname Ikeda, ITER Director-General, HSH Prince Albert II, Matthew Jewell, Junghee Kim, Axel Winter, Sophie Carpentier.
In February, the Divertor Test Platform Facility was inaugurated in Finland featuring the first full-size prototype for ITER: The Divertor Cassette Multifunctional Mover.
In March, the ITER Organization presents the Japanese Domestic Agency and the company Hitachi with an award for their performance in producing the first strands for the TF conductor (two bottles of champagne to represent the ITER site and a bottle of Sake to represent the source of the material).
Honey Bees can be trained to sniff out explosives such as TNT, so why not use them for localizing leaks within the ITER vacuum system? The Think Tank in action in April.
ITER Director-General Kaname Ikeda and the Head of the Indian Domestic Agency, Shishir Deshpande, signing the document that will launch the construction of ITER's Diagnostic Neutral Beam Power Supplies.
It is big, powerful and superconducting - ITER Communication this year launched a series of short videos explaining the what, why, and how of the project.
A prototype of the five bushing rings that serve as insulators on ITER's Neutral Beam Heating System was produced at KYOCERA Corporation and passed testing of the metalizing/brazing process at Hitachi Haramachi Electronics Company in Japan in May.
"This is probably the closest most of us will ever get to the ITER Tokamak," said Didier Gambier, Director of the European Domestic Agency "Fusion for Energy" (F4E) on 27 May, when a historic all-staff photo was taken exactly where the future heart of the ITER machine, the tokamak, will be built.
In June, the young Japanese students attending the International School of Manosque were all smiles. Hidden inside big cardboard boxes were 847 books that had made a long journey across the globe to reach southern France. The donation comes from employees of the Naka Fusion Research Institute who had heard that Japanese books were hard to get over here. An unexpected present that was welcomed with cheers of joy and a big thank you: どうも有り難うございます。.
On 9 June, two more Procurement Arrangements were signed for ITER's Upper Ports and the Divertor Dome: Akademik Evgeny Velikhov (right), President of the Kurchatov Institute and Vice-Chair of the ITER Council, signing the PA on behalf of the Russian Federation with Anatoli Krasilnikov (left), Head of the Russian Domestic Agency and next to him standing is Kimihiro Ioki, Head of the Vacuum Vessel Division.
La fusion, c'est magique! When ITER took its new exhibition stand to the Eurofoire at the Parc de Drouille in Manosque in June, the fascination was obvious; in the eyes of the visitors as well as in the eyes of ITER Webmaster Topher White.
A bulky business concept payed off: the German students Nicolas, Constantin, Magnus, Tobias and Frederik with their big seller, the tokamak. Selling tokamaks was one of the business strategies recently presented by five students from a school in Dülken, Germany who were participating in a management game called "Jugend gründet". In this game, young students between the age of 16 and 21 start their own business — fictionally - and experience the bulls and bears of the global financial stock market.
In July, China's first TF Conductor sample (TFCN1) was successfully tested at the SULTAN test facility in Switzerland. The photo shows the compaction machine at ASIPP for conductor jacketing.
All doors to manual - ITER Director-General Kaname Ikeda taking off in a Eurocopter at Marignane airport. Like ITER, Eurocopter is a truly international enterprise with components delivered to Marseille from all around the world.
The future is a three-letter word: IPS (Integrated Project Schedule). E. Barbero, A. Aburadani, N. Merli and M. Felip during a meeting of the Planning and Scheduling Working Group in July.
The documentary "Hotter than a thousand volcanoes" lay forgotten in a dust-covered box at Tore Supra. It conveys the excitement of fusion research at a defining moment — when the promises of a half-century of research materialized for two seconds in JET's vacuum vessel.
The schedule was aggressive, but they met the deadline in time: in the space of eight weeks, the PF Coil Section and 19 CAD designers from the ITER Organization and the two companies Sogeti and Assystem finished the 3D models and 800 detailed drawings of ITER's Poloidal Field Coils number 2 to 5.
Rianne 't Hoen, master-student at the FOM Institute for Plasma Physics Rijnhuizen Nieuwegein, Netherlands, was the official ITER-fan number 1000 on Facebook!
2009 was the time to say goodbye to many dear colleagues: Here, the Diagnostics team toasts Alan Costley and a half-century of contribution to fusion physics.
In September, the German Television ZDF broadcasted a feature on ITER called "Das Sonnenexperiment", the "Sun Experiment". The ITER project is introduced as the biggest technical challenge of all times.
24 September 2009: During the IO-DA coordination meeting at Chengdu, China, the Procurement Arrangement for the In-Wall Shielding (IWS) - Number 26 for those who are counting - was signed by the ITER Organization and the Indian Domestic Agency. The picture shows Dr. Shishir P. Deshpande, Project Director of ITER-India and Dr. Norbert Holtkamp, Principal Deputy Director-General of the ITER Organization signing the In-Wall Shielding PA. Others in the picture from left to right are Akko Maas, Yusuke Tada, Guenter Janeschitz, Peter Swenson, Indranil Bandyopadhyay, Haresh Pathak (IWS Responsible Officer) and Vinay Kumar.
Zahra Desperrier, who spent six months as an intern with the ITER Magnet Division, obtained her Master's in fusion 27 years after graduating from Engineering School.
In October, the Chinese ITER Domestic Agency awards its first contract. The picture shows Luo Delong (left) and Jiangan Li shaking hands after the signing ceremony in Beijing.
Vladimir Vlasenkov and Carl Strawbridge - who officially retired a few weeks ago - obviously enjoy writing the summary report of the second Technical Integration Subgroup meeting.
ITER at the Falling Walls Conference in Berlin - On 9 November 2009 - the 20th anniversary of the end of the iron curtain - the Einstein Foundation in Berlin raised the question: Which are the next walls to fall - and how will they affect our lives? Over twenty acclaimed international researchers were invited to provide answers at the scientific conference "Falling Walls," amongst them ITER Principal Deputy Director-General Norbert Holtkamp.
A new milestone for the project and a happy "family" celebrating it: Director-General Kaname Ikeda after the signature of the Procurement Arrangement for the ITER Vacuum Vessel with Didier Gambier, Director of Fusion For Energy, on 19 November.
The second day of the fifth Council meeting happened to be the birthday of Chairman Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith. He had wanted to see diggers and bulldozers on the platform ... and he got them! His birthday cake was in the shape of the ITER platform — complete with diggers and flagpole.
Aerial view of the Nippon Steel Engineering jacketing facility in Kita-Kyushu on the northern tip of the Japanese island of Kyushu. The ground-breaking ceremony had taken place in January 2009.
A photo of the TBM mock-up retracted from its enclosure outside a horiztontal port of the DIII-D Tokamak in San Diego. Two racetrack-shaped electromagnets are shown that produce mainly toroidal field. They surround a solenoidal-shaped coil that produces mainly vertical field.
On Monday, 14 September, the 154 children of the International School in Manosque moved from their temporary habitat in the Lycée des Iscles to the new school building.
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