The overhead crane that gave its name and reputation to the company still stands in one of the factory workshops in Villefranche-sur-Saône, near Lyon, France. Back in the 1950s, the crane's innovative design had won first prize at one of France's largest post-war industrial exhibits. The crane was patented under the name REEL—for Rational, Economic, Elegant and Light—which was soon adopted for the whole company. In the course of seven decades REEL has expanded dramatically. It is present on four continents and specializes in bespoke handling equipment for the nuclear, aerospace, aluminium, defence and offshore industries. In the summer of 2013, the European Domestic Agency for ITER signed a contract with a consortium under REEL's umbrella(1) for the design and manufacturing of the crane and trolley system that will handle and pre-assemble components before they are integrated into the ITER Tokamak. In terms of both load and precision, the handling tasks will require exceptional lifting capacities. A pair of independent bridge cranes—composed of 47-metre-long girders and heavy-lift trolleys—form the principal overhead lifting system with a capacity to manoeuvre loads of up to 1,500 metric tons and perform millimetre-scale positioning for the pre-assembly operations. However sturdy and powerful, a girder is a hollow structure—a skeleton made of steel plates welded together and reinforced by frames, ribs, spacers and stiffeners (here, the pre-welding assembly of a 50-tonne crane at REEL's workshop in Villefranche-sur-Saône, France). Although REEL has designed and manufactured cranes of all sizes and purpose, the order for a double 750-tonne lifting system was a first. "Until now, a standard order was in the 160- to 180-tonne range," explains Benoit Nakul, who oversees ITER fabrication for REEL. "But whatever the lifting capacity the architecture is basically the same. It's a matter of calculating how to spread the load."The first challenge when designing a crane capable of lifting such heavy loads is to keep the deadweight of the crane itself as low as possible. "This is paramount to reduce the forces that are exerted on the building structure in normal operating conditions and to mitigate the consequences in case of a seismic event," explains Nakul. In Villefranche-sur-Saône REEL handled the manufacturing of the four 375-tonne trolleys. But due to limited lifting capacity at that site, the fabrication of the four girders was subcontracted to the Spanish industrial group Asturfeito, already involved in several fusion contracts. However sturdy and powerful, a girder is a hollow structure—a skeleton made of steel plates welded together and reinforced by frames, ribs, spacers and stiffeners, whose size and position are determined by sophisticated load calculations. Once a precise mapping of the loads has been achieved and a 3D model finalized, girder fabrication can begin which is a challenge in itself. "We're dealing with structures that are almost 50 metres long, with tolerances in the millimetre range. Welding is a particularly delicate operation as the heat/energy loads involved can cause irreversible deformations, and we need to butt-weld 12-metre-long, 60-millimetre-thick steel plates and still achieve perfect planarity..." In addition to the main system that will lift loads of up to 1,500 tonnes, REEL will also deliver an auxiliary 50-tonne overhead crane, which is currently in the fabrication stage. The girders that come out of the factory have a slight, deliberate curvature. This "counter-boom" is precisely calculated to allow the girders, once in place, to straighten under their own weight. The design still allows for some flexibility as each crane will lift a wide range of loads, from a few dozen to many hundreds of tons.The quest for the best ratio between deadweight and strength has resulted in a mass of approximately 600 tonnes per overhead crane (including the girders, their auxiliaries and the trolleys). "This means that we have a crane system weighing 1,200 tonnes that is scaled to lift up to 1,500 tonnes—25 percent more than its own weight. And this huge mass needs to be manoeuvred and positioned with millimetre precision..." The 1,500-tonne overhead crane system, spanning the whole width of the Assembly Hall, is due to be installed in June. At a later stage—when the Tokamak Building is complete—the Assembly Hall rails will be extended 80 metres to allow travelling from one building to the other in order to deliver the pre-assembled components to the Tokamak assembly pit.(1) The NKMNOELL-REEL consortium is formed by NKMNoell Special Cranes GmbH, Germany and REEL S.A.S., France  

The European Domestic Agency has announced recent contract awards totalling EUR 140 million for high-tech engineering, R&D tasks and civil construction works for ITER. The beneficiaries of these contracts are two firms from France—Constructions Industrielles de la Méditerranée (CNIM) and the Spie Batignolles Group in association with ADF.   The Toulon-based group CNIM, which is already manufacturing half of the toroidal field coil radial plates on behalf of Europe, has been awarded a contract for poloidal field coil manufacturing. Included in the scope of the four-year contract is the fabrication and testing of a mock-up coil to validate processes, the subsequent manufacturing of four poloidal field coils ranging in weight between 200 and 400 tonnes, acceptance controls, and cold testing at approximately -193 ËšC/ 80 K. This is the fifth contract signed by Europe to cover the activities related to the fabrication of poloidal field coils 2,3,4 and 5, which will be produced in a dedicated facility on the ITER site.   A second contract has gone to CNIM and its subsidiary Bertin Technologies for the realization of ITER's in-vessel viewing system, a high-tech robotic viewing system that will aid ITER operators to carry out visual inspection inside the ITER machine. The seven-year contract covers the design and installation of six remotely controlled visual inspection and measurement systems capable of operating in the harsh environment of the vacuum chamber and of taking 3D pictures with a resolution of 1 to 3 millimetres.   The Spie Batignolles consortium (Spie Batignolles TPCI/Spie Batignolles Sud-Est/Valérian) and ADF have been awarded a contract to deliver on-site electricity and hydraulic networks. Civil engineering works carried out under this contract include services trenches, a precipitation drainage system to collect runoff water, hydraulics networks, outdoor lighting, roads, and parking areas over a total surface area of 200,000 m2. Spie Batignolles was the contractor that built the Poloidal Field Coils Winding Facility and the Cryostat Workshop.

Safety in a nuclear installation is about regulations as much as it is about attitude. As the need to develop a strong safety culture within the whole scope of the project is being reaffirmed, Joëlle Elbez-Uzan, head of the ITER Environmental Protection & Nuclear Safety Division, explains why safety should be "embedded in our day-to-day attitudes and actions." How would you define "safety culture"?Safety culture is about ownership, on both a collective and individual basis, of the objectives defined by safety regulations. It consists in developing a questioning, constructive and I would say "pro-active" attitude towards any issue that is safety-related. Once this approach is adopted, safety ceases to be perceived as a constraint and it becomes embedded in our day-to-day attitudes and actions. Beginning in 2013, you have organized safety workshops for ITER staff, Domestic Agency personnel and contractors. Is it because the ITER Project lacks a safety culture? ITER is the first fusion project that falls under nuclear safety regulations. If one excepts JET and TFTR, which briefly and successfully experimented with a deuterium-tritium mix in the 1990s, no fusion installation has ever had to deal with a significant inventory of nuclear fuel or with the activation that neutrons generate in plasma-facing components. For scientists and engineers who come from research labs and tokamaks, this is a new situation—one we need to explain in terms of both regulations and attitude. It is part of our job in the Nuclear Safety Division to provide not only the basic safety knowledge but also the philosophy on how safety should be approached. The key word here is pragmatism: we need to proceed in a very practical manner, with concrete examples drawn from experience. We need to provide the 'keys' that will help unlock situations and solve problems, and this is precisely what the workshops are about. The strong workshop attendance, always on a voluntary basis, is proof that there's now a widespread understanding of what is at stake in fostering a strong safety culture within ITER—and what is at stake is no less than the project's success.  Joëlle Elbez-Uzan, head of the ITER Environmental Protection & Nuclear Safety Division, at the recent MIIFED in Monaco. "The key word [in safety culture] is pragmatism." So I wouldn't say ITER lacks a safety culture. But as we are now fully into our daily responsibilities as the nuclear facility owner, it is essential that the "safety attitude" be embedded into each and every action we take.And I would add that we have the privilege of growing the first-of-a-kind "fusion safety culture" from within. It is a remarkable opportunity. ITER observes French nuclear safety regulations which are among the most stringent in the world. France's approach is also different from that of other countries... Yes, the French approach is quite unique—it is not prescriptive. The French regulations define objectives and let the nuclear operator propose the means to meet these objectives. Solutions have to be proportional to what is a stake in terms of safety. It's a creative, adaptive and rather elegant process...

WEST's international call for modelling and experimental proposals was successfully completed on 15 March 2016 with more than 150 proposals received from the ITER Organization, Europe, USA, China, Japan, India, Korea and Russia. The first WEST Experiment Planning Meeting will be held on 18-20 April 2016 at CEA Cadarache to discuss the prioritization of experimental and modelling proposals and to define a timeline for the 2016-2017 WEST experimental campaigns.  

At the first edition of the Security Meetings exhibition in Cannes, France, on 22-24 March 2016, ITER Head of Security, Health & Safety Christophe Ramu was awarded the title of "Security Director of the Year." A first of its kind, the exhibition brought together more than 120 participants from prestigious organizations such as CEA, Aéroport de Paris, Airbus, Air France, Banque de France, Bolloré, Bouygues, Capgemini, Cartier, City of Marseille, Engie, Gendarmerie Nationale, Hyatt, Intercontinental, Lafarge, Razel-bec, Saint-Gobain, Suez, Orange, DHL and Musée du Louvres. During the event, four security awards were also attributed to reward outstanding initiatives in security approach. In the category "Security Director of the Year," Christophe Ramu was recognized for his professionalism and innovation in the exercise of his profession. Christophe, who joined ITER in 2012 after serving for 20 years at Marseille's Marine Fire Battalion, is managing—among many other tasks—the evolution in the implementation of a pre-enrolment system for accessing the ITER site. This system will enable on-site contracting companies, once they are accredited by the ITER Organization, to manage access requests for their own personnel. The system, which will be fully operational in the second half of 2016, will also improve the monitoring activity of personnel presence and localization on the ITER site.

Cooling 10,000 tons of superconducting magnets that will confine the energy-generating plasma is indispensable to the proper working of the ITER Tokamak. The cryogenic plant, whose design phase began in 2013, has now entered the fabrication phase at the Air Liquide factory near Grenoble, France. This impressive centralized cryogenic refrigeration system will be composed of helium (He) and nitrogen (N2) refrigeration units and dedicated storage, operating in a closed loop. Helium, at a temperature of close to the absolute zero (-269°C, or 4.5K), will be used to cool magnets, vacuum pumps and certain diagnostic systems. Nitrogen, whose temperature (-196°C, or 77K) is not quite as low, will contribute among other things to the cooling of the heat shield and to the pre-cooling of the helium refrigeration unit and the helium loops. The site's three helium units (LHe) will occupy 3,000 m2 of the 5,400 m2 set aside for the ITER cryogenic unit. LHe is composed of several compression stations and three large cold boxes, which weigh 135 tons each, measure 21 metres in length, and have a diameter of 4.2 metres. On average, the helium refrigeration units will provide a global cooling capacity of 75kW to 4.5K, which translates into a maximum liquefaction rate of 12,300 liters/hour. They will be completed by two nitrogen units (LN2). The 11 helium and nitrogen gas storage units—with a total capacity of 3,700 m3 (of which 3,300 m3 for the helium)—will help to optimize the recovery of fluids in the various operational phases of the tokamak. View the special issue on ITER in Cryoscope, a magazine from Air Liquide.

For Lego enthusiasts the ITER Tokamak is an endless source of inspiration.  In June 2012, Newsline reported on Japanese artist Sachiko Akinaga who had created an 8,000-piece tokamak assembly scene using standard Lego bricks. Two years later an American videogame designer, Andrew Clark, tried to convince the Lego company to bring his model of the ITER Tokamak into commercial production; unfortunately, the proposal never gathered the 10,000 "votes of support" required to turn the project into an official set. At the University of Kyoto in Japan, another Lego venture is taking shape. A group of students in fusion materials and reactor engineering (Konishi Laboratory, Dr Kasada's group) has built a highly realistic version of the ITER Tokamak with all major components in place—coils, ports, heating systems, and Test Blanket Modules are all identified by a different colour. The students even managed to insert a waveguide into the vacuum vessel wall... An achievement in terms of both realism and poetry, the ITER-LEGO project will be used for the promotion of fusion energy in exhibitions and conferences. Click here to view a video of the ITER-LEGO.