Rem Haange receives 2011 Fusion Technology Award

For his transformational technical leadership of international fusion experiments and lifetime dedication to furthering the development of fusion energy, ITER Deputy Director-General Rem Haange has received the 2011 Fusion Technology award. The award, comprising USD 3,000 in prize money and a plaque, was presented to Rem at the 24th Symposium on Fusion Engineering (SOFE) in Chicago last week.

In his presentation, chairman of the IEEE/NPSS Fusion Technology Committee Dennis Youchison (Sandia National Laboratories) noted Haange's "outstanding career and innovative technical leadership in service to the fusion technology community."

"I was truly flabbergasted when I was told about my nomination," Rem, as most people call him, told the audience at the award ceremony on Wednesday, 29 July in Chicago's Adler Planetarium. "I was 13 years old when I read an article about nuclear energy and then I decided not to become a soldier or a pilot, but a nuclear engineer."

Before he joined the ITER project in January this year, Rem had a long career in fusion. He worked at JET for more than 19 years, he led the ITER team in Naka, Japan for many years, and in his last position, he was technical director of the W7-X Stellarator project based in Greifswald, Germany.

Rem commented that apart from working in a fascinating engineering field at the forefront of several technologies, collaborating with engineers and physicists from all over the world continues to be a very pleasant aspect of working in fusion.

Former IEEE Fusion Technology Award recipients include René Raffray, head of the ITER Blanket Section and Brad Nelson from the US ITER Project Office in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.