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

Sailing the high seas with Iter

Strollers at the Cercle Nautique et Touristique du Lacydon (CNTL) in Marseille's Vieux-Port, keep asking Iter's skipper for documentation on plasmas, fusion and tokamaks ... (Click to view larger version...)
Strollers at the Cercle Nautique et Touristique du Lacydon (CNTL) in Marseille's Vieux-Port, keep asking Iter's skipper for documentation on plasmas, fusion and tokamaks ...
When insurance broker Albert Heraud bought a sailboat in 1989, ITER was only one year into Conceptual Design Activities (CDA) and the project's acronym was unknown to the general public.

Few people were aware that "iter"—not the acronym but the noun—translated as "the way," "the route" or "the journey." One would have to have been a Latinist or theologian to know this.

Albert Heraud, however, was neither one nor the other. But as his daughter had just started studying Latin in lycée, she suggested that "Iter" would be quite an appropriate name for the family's sailboat.

"It was a perfect choice, and an original one," says the proud father today. "You cannot imagine how difficult it is to find a meaningful name for a boat ..."

And so it was that, for some 15 years, Iter sailed the seas, hopping from island to island in the Bay of Marseille, taking the Herauds to Corsica in the summer, unaware of the bigger ITER that was taking form and gathering momentum on the horizon.

"At some point, it must have been around 2004," Heraud recollects, "ITER began making headlines, especially here in the local press because of the possibility that Cadarache would host the project."

The realization that there was something else also named Iter—and something that promised to be very big—was embarrassing; wasn't it a bit pretentious for a nine-metre sailboat to bear the same name as a multi-billion-euro project?"

At about that time, strollers on the Vieux-Port Marina, in Marseille, began asking Heraud if he was sponsored by the ITER Organization  or if he could kindly provide them with documentation on fusion and tokamaks ...

It got to the point where Iter's skipper considered changing the name of his boat. "However, I decided not to. After all, I was here first, at least before everybody around me became aware of ... that other ITER."

Still, relations between Iter-the-sailboat and the ITER Project are not simple. When ITER Communications reached Heraud to enquire about his boat, he refused to believe someone from the project was actually calling him.

It took several phone calls, a lot of persuasion and the production of some evidence before he agreed to meet, on a bright Saturday morning, on Marseille's Vieux-Port where Iter is docked.

And until this article is published, he will not be completely certain this whole thing is not a hoax.

Special thanks to Stéphane Vartanian, of CEA/IRFM, for having spotted Iter in the Vieux-Port Marina.


return to the latest published articles