Director General Nominee of ITER, Kaname Ikeda, gave an overview in which he described the roles and responsibilities of the partners who will take part in constructing ITER, the present status and structure of the ITER organization, and its targets in the short term. ITER PDDG Nominee Norbert Holtkamp spoke about the engineering challenges for ITER, such as the performance of the superconducting magnets, neutral beam development, and flexibility during operation. He also described the design review process, which should lead to a new ITER baseline design in spring 2007.
Many of the presentations of the conference are available on the web
here and here.
The next IAEA fusion conference will be held in Geneva, Switzerland, in 2008.
On 24 October, the Agence ITER France invited the wives of the growing international ITER staff for a 'Discovery Day' around the ancient cities of Aix-en-Provence and Marseille. Thirteen ladies from India, Japan, Canada, the United States, Korea and Europe plus three children took the opportunity.
On foot they first discovered the medieval lanes of Aix, led by an official guide. Then they drove to Marseille to explore the vibrant silhouette of Europe's third biggest harbour, climbed Notre Dame de la Garde and finally they were shown the best places to buy fresh fish, exotic spices and fine clothing. By the end of the day, they decided to create an "Association of ITER spouses". For further information about the activities, please contact the Welcome Office at +33 (0)4 42 25 33 61.
At the 21st IAEA Fusion Energy Conference in Chengdu, China, the lead author of a paper that demonstrates how one of the primary physics goals of ITER might be more safely realised was awarded the inaugural Nuclear Fusion Award, which is presented by the IAEA.
T.C. Luce et al. were awarded the prestigious prize for their paper 'Stationary high-performance discharges in the DIII-D tokamak' (Nuclear Fusion 43 (5), pp. 321-329). The paper outlines a tokamak scenario that can maintain high fusion performance at reduced plasma current (compared with the conventional tokamak operational scenario), thereby lessening the potential for structural damage in the event of a plasma disruption. Projections in the paper show that realization of this scenario in ITER could lead to fusion performance at or above an energy gain of 10 for longer duration with reduced risk.
|
On November 28th, Jean Jacquinot and Robert Arnoux will present their book on ITER, called "ITER, le chemin des étoiles?". The book is written in French, and aimed at a non-scientific readership.
Jean Jacquinot is currently scientific adviser to the French High Commissioner for atomic energy, and is a former Director of JET and Head of the CEA fusion programme. Robert Arnoux is a distinguished French journalist, who writes for the newspaper La Provence. The book presentation is part of the lecture series "Les Matinees de Cadarache", on the CEA site (see "Calendar").
Born in 1944 in Beijing, Dr. Shaoqi Wang received his Doctorate in Electronic Engineering in 1984 in France, at the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble. Before that he had been an electrical engineer at the China Xinhe shipyards for ten years, responsible for electrical engineering design and installation. In 1984 he became Director of European Affairs at the Department of International Cooperation of the State Science and Technology Commission of China.
After four years as Science Counsellor in the Chinese Embassy in Paris he returned to China as Director-General, Department of International Cooperation, Ministry of Science and Technology of China. Since 2001, Shaoqi Wang returned to Paris as Minister- Counsellor at the Chinese Embassy. His French therefore is close to perfect, which will help him as ITER Deputy Director General for Administration. As such he will be responsible for all Human Resources aspects of the project as well as budgeting, contract procurements and — last but not least - public relations. "As more and more people learn about the project there will be an increasing demand for information", he says.
India became a full seventh partner of ITER in December 2005. The Institute for Plasma Research (IPR), located in Ghandhinagar, western India, forms the Indian Domestic Agency, empowered to design, build and deliver those contributions to ITER which have been agreed in the procurement sharing. The ITER activities of IPR have been named ITER-India, and its formal organizational structure was constituted on July 5th, 2006.
IPR is an autonomous physics research institute, carrying out research in basic and applied plasma physics. Although the institute harbours a large number of basic experimental devices for research in plasma physics, the main thrust of the research is high temperature tokamak experiments. The institute is currently in the process of building the Steady State Superconducting Tokamak (SST-1).
Read more about IPR
Read more about ITER India
|