Subscribe options

Select your newsletters:

Please enter your email address:

@

Your email address will only be used for the purpose of sending you the ITER Organization publication(s) that you have requested. ITER Organization will not transfer your email address or other personal data to any other party or use it for commercial purposes.

If you change your mind, you can easily unsubscribe by clicking the unsubscribe option at the bottom of an email you've received from ITER Organization.

For more information, see our Privacy policy.

News & Media

Latest ITER Newsline

  • Test facility | How do electronics react to magnetic fields?

    A tokamak is basically a magnetic cage designed to confine, shape and control the super-hot plasmas that make fusion reactions possible. Inside the ITER Tokamak [...]

    Read more

  • ITER Robots | No two alike

    More than 500 students took part in the latest ITER Robots challenge. Working from the same instructions and technical specifications, they had worked in teams [...]

    Read more

  • Data archiving | Operating in quasi real time

    To accommodate the first real-time system integrated with the ITER control system, new components of the data archiving system have been deployed. Data archivi [...]

    Read more

  • Repairs | Setting the stage for a critical task

    Like in a game of musical chairs—albeit in slow motion and at a massive scale—components in the Assembly Hall are being transferred from one location to another [...]

    Read more

  • Image of the week | There is life on Planet ITER

    Dated April 2023, this new image of the ITER "planet" places the construction site squarely in the middle. One kilometre long, 400 metres wide, the IT [...]

    Read more

Of Interest

See archived entries

ITER NEWSLINE -

Award

A 30-year friendship with China

Some thirty years ago, HT-7, China's first superconducting tokamak, was entering operation and experiencing some issues with its ion cyclotron resonance (ICRH) antenna. As the fusion world was already one tight-knit family, the European Commission dispatched a young plasma physicist to Hefei, in Anhui province, where the Institute of Plasma Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ASIPP) operated the machine.

Alain Bécoulet, in China in 2006, half-way into a 30-year relationship built on ''warm and confident relationships''. (Click to view larger version...)
Alain Bécoulet, in China in 2006, half-way into a 30-year relationship built on ''warm and confident relationships''.
For Alain Bécoulet, current head of ITER engineering (and former head of France's Institute for Magnetic Fusion Research, IRFM, which operates the WEST project), the mission¹ opened a new chapter in his life, marked by multifaceted collaborations, international agreements and, above all, long-lasting personal friendships.

In the Anhui province, friendships that are particularly meaningful are honoured by a special distinction, the "Huangshan Friendship Award." Last week, it was bestowed on Bécoulet in recognition of his 30-year relationship with ASIPP and the part he played in the development of scientific collaborations between the Chinese and European fusion communities.

For Bécoulet, who received another Chinese distinction earlier this year (the Scientific and Technological Cooperation Award of the People's Republic of China), the Friendship medal holds a special value. "It's not just about the formal collaborations we have established between Chinese institutions and the WEST tokamak, or the Sino-French agreement SIFFER, or the CEA-ASIPP partnership ... it is also, and maybe above all, the warm and confident relationships that we developed during these three decades."

In the early 1990s, when Bécoulet went to Hefei to lend a hand to his ASIPP colleagues, ITER was a four-partner project that China would not join before a full decade. But the seeds of understanding and collaboration were planted, and for the present ITER Engineering Domain Head this is a most precious asset.

 ¹Bécoulet was accompanied by Bertrand Beaumont, a radio frequency heating expert, now head of the ITER Ion Cyclotron section.

return to the latest published articles