After years of design, construction and installation, the futuristic stage was set: a grand glass-walled sphere surrounded by the pavilions of 100 countries, the exhibits of 10 international organizations, and fair grounds designed to host over 2 million people in three months. The doors of the 2017 World's Fair opened in Astana, Kazakhstan on 10 June to the theme of "Future Energy"—a topic that resonates directly with the mission and vision of the ITER Project. It is only logical, then, that ITER and fusion were well represented at this exceptional technological showcase. "I cannot imagine any science and engineering project with a greater potential impact on the future than harnessing the power of the sun and the stars," ITER Director-General Bernard Bigot said, as he inaugurated the ITER exhibition.   When US architects Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill began to design the EXPO 2017 structures—which, seen from a distance, resemble a spaceport—the landscape was not much more than dry steppe. On 174 hectares they have created a visually remarkable exhibition area consisting of more than 200 buildings and nationally themed pavilions. The centerpiece is an 80-metre-in-diameter sphere showcasing the history and vision of the EXPO host country, Kazakhstan.   A few steps away from this central nucleus, the ITER Organization has designed a 110-square-metre exhibition within the French Pavilion. There, the benefits of fusion as a potential source of safe, clean and virtually unlimited energy—and the ITER Project under construction now, underwritten by 35 nations—are explained through a series of multimedia tools, models, displays and virtual reality. As Host to the project, France had invited ITER to participate in EXPO 2017 alongside technologically innovative companies such as Peugeot, Total and Veolia.   The opening of the Chinese Pavilion drew an enthusiastic crowd eager to learn about fusion. A holographic model of the ITER Tokamak was one of the highlights. "The future of fusion—like the future of science—is partnership." This conclusion, delivered by Director-General Bigot at the inauguration ceremony, was reinforced both by the exhibit content and the attendance of French Commissioner Pascal Lorot and the heads of the European, Russian, Korean and Chinese Domestic Agencies for ITER.   "Let me assure you that we are grateful to have so many of you as our partners. I offer my thanks to the Government of France, my warmest wishes to our gracious Kazakh hosts for a beautiful and memorable World EXPO-2017, and my most sincere welcome to all of you and your guests at this inauguration of the ITER exhibit."   The ITER exhibit is not the only one featuring fusion energy in Astana. The Chinese Pavilion features a spectacular 4D cinema show and a cutting-edge model of the ITER machine that uses holographic animation. Visitors to the central Sphere are also treated to a model of the KTM tokamak—reduced-size, but large enough to climb into.   Read the full text of the ITER Director-General's speech here.  

The ITER Organization has officially welcomed the National Nuclear Center of the Republic of Kazakhstan (NNC-RK) as a new technical collaborator.   On Sunday 11 June, a Cooperation Agreement was signed by ITER Director-General Bernard Bigot and the director of Kazakhstan's National Nuclear Center, Erlan Batyrbekov, calling for scientific and engineering cooperation between the two institutions. Agreement scope includes the technical exchange of experts, access to Kazakhstan's KTM tokamak for materials testing, and the development of diagnostics for ITER.   Kazakhstan also has an abundance of mineral resources that are of interest to ITER, some of which—like beryllium—are of great relevance to the project.   "We are very thankful to add today a new collaboration partner to the ITER Project," said Bernard Bigot. "It is a unique opportunity, enabling us to perform detailed material studies at the recently inaugurated KTM tokamak."   The row of VIP guests attending the signing ceremony: His Excellency Francis Etienne, French Ambassador to Kazakhstan; Excellency Georg A. Krol, US Ambassador to Kazakhstan; His Excellency Harish K Jain, Indian Ambassador to Kazakhstan; Mr Thomas Huet, Scientific and Technical Cooperation Attaché to the French Ambassador; and Vice-Minister of Energy of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Bakhytzhan Dzhaksaliev. The Agreement was signed on the second day of the 2017 World's Fair, which is taking place in Astana, Kazakhstan.   The signing ceremony was incorporated into the Ministerial Conference on Securing Sustainable Energy Development, held before a large gathering of delegates and media representatives at the EXPO Congress Center. It was attended by the Vice-Minister of Energy of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Bakhytzhan Dzhaksaliev; the French Ambassador to Kazakhstan, Francis Etienne; the US Ambassador in Astana, George A. Krol; and the Ambassador of India, Shri Harsh Kumar Jain.   The Kazakhstan Tokamak for Materials testing (KTM) is based at the National Nuclear Center in the city of Kurchatov, in the eastern part of the country. With a vacuum vessel volume of 12.3 cubic metres (compared to ITER's 840 cubic metres), the KTM is smaller and differently shaped than the ITER Tokamak. Copper poloidal and toroidal field coils and a central solenoid wound with copper and silver alloy conductors provide the magnetic "cage" of the device.    Full house, pens and cameras ready. A large media crowd was waiting to catch the signing ceremony. The design of the divertor is one of the smaller machine's striking features. KTM's divertor consists of plasma-facing plates mounted on a rotary table—the plates can be replaced without venting the vacuum vessel by way of the table's rotating and vertical movements. This capability, along with other assembly-disassembly systems, is immensely advantageous for a machine that is intended to test plasma-facing materials under powerful particle and heat flux. It enables operators to remove and exchange components in a relatively short time.   The Cooperation Agreement with the National Nuclear Center of the Republic of Kazakhstan is only the second time that the ITER Organization has established technical collaboration with a non-Member institution. (The first example is the Cooperation Agreement signed with ANSTO, the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, in September 2016.)   Read the press release in English or French.

In ITER, one finds all kinds of magnets: a central solenoid weighing approximately 1,000 tonnes; 18 vertical, D-shaped coils, each as heavy as a fully-loaded 747; 6 ring magnets up to 24 metres in diameter; a set of 18 planar and non-planar correction coils, some of them banana-shaped and ... 400 much smaller coils that are 11 millimetres thick, with external dimensions ranging from 150 to 300 millimetres, that will be fitted in the narrow space between the ITER vacuum vessel and its surrounding heat shields. Designed to measure the magnetic field around the tokamak's core, these smallish outer vessel coils belong to the ITER diagnostics system. They will be manufactured by the Spanish company Elytt Energy, which just signed a EUR 2 million contract with the European Domestic Agency. Delivery to ITER for installation on the ITER vacuum vessel is foreseen for mid-2018. Read the full article on the website of the European Domestic Agency. 

Destined for the lower levels of the Tokamak Building the magnet feeders—which will route supercritical helium, large amounts of electrical power and instrumentation to the superconducting magnet systems—are some of the first components required for installation at ITER. Segments manufactured in China will be shipped to the site, where specialized teams will be on hand to assemble and install the full components. The most delicate part of the assembly operation—the creation of superconducting joints—has been the object of a multiyear qualification program. An ITER magnet feeder is made up of a pair of superconducting busbars, a pair of current leads, several cryogenic fluid transport pipes for cooling, and high- and low-voltage instrumentation conduits. During assembly activities on site, hundreds of superconducting joints will have to be created to assemble segments of the busbars ... and to connect the busbars to the coil terminals. This work—one of the most technically challenging parts of assembly—will be carried out by trained teams inside of the Tokamak assembly arena.   The Chinese institute ASIPP has been on the front line of research and development on the magnet feeder joints for ITER.  Teams there produced a joint qualification sample to optimize and validate key manufacturing procedures and to verify constructability within the known constraints of assembly in the Tokamak Pit.   This main busbar* (MB) joint sample—the type that will connect busbars to the toroidal field, poloidal field and central solenoid magnets—was recently subjected to electrical resistance tests in the ASIPP laboratory, with successful results.  A stable outcome of ~0.2 nΩ at 70 kA was achieved and preserved after thermal cycles and 30,000 mechanical fatigue cycles. These results meet the technical specifications of the Magnet Feeder Procurement Arrangement, signed in 2011 between the ITER Organization and the Chinese Domestic Agency.   Working from the superconducting joint configuration produced in China, a feeder joint sample was reproduced at the MIFI workshop by trained and certified CEA technicians. The sample was then transported to the SULTAN facility in Switzerland for testing under background magnetic field. Now, in order to learn the techniques that will have to be implemented in situ during ITER assembly, the ITER Organization has reproduced the effort closer to home.   Within the framework of the MIFI collaboration (for Magnet Infrastructure Facilities for ITER) between the ITER Organization and the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), the joint sample has been reproduced only a stone's throw from the ITER site. The sample was then transported to the SULTAN test facility in Switzerland—the only facility in the world capable of reproducing the magnetic fields, current intensity and temperature conditions of the ITER operational environment. This was the first opportunity to verify the performance of the joint sample in various magnetic fields and to investigate stability and current distribution characteristics—important steps to ensuring that the joints perform as expected once reproduced at ITER.   At SULTAN, the resistance of the joint sample was successfully tested as ~ 0.85 nΩ at 3.8 T and 68 kA (performance maintained under several thermal cycles and 1,000 electromagnetic cycles).   ITER feeder engineer Hyungjun Kim (far left) at SULTAN with test specialists. SULTAN is the only facility in the world capable of reproducing the magnetic fields, current intensity and temperature conditions of the ITER operational environment. The procurement of the base materials, the fabrication, and the assembly of the MIFI sample took place under the supervision of the ITER feeder team, which has taken the lead in the design of the sample and has established qualification procedures on key processes such as manufacturing and inspection. These procedures—developed in close collaboration with the MIFI and ASIPP teams—were the basis for the successful testing of both joint samples at ASIPP and SULTAN.The criticality of the superconducting feeder joints stems from the fact that they can only be truly tested once the machine is up and running. "Because they are among the most risk-prone elements of Tokamak assembly, it is very important to fully qualify all processes and fully train the staff that will be carrying out the work in the Tokamak Pit," explains Arnaud Devred, who leads the Superconductor Systems & Auxiliaries Section. "The lessons learned through the manufacture and testing of the main busbar joint sample is an important step in this direction, reflecting several years of hard work at MIFI by the feeder team." The details of the test results are scheduled to be presented at the 25th Magnet Technology Conference in August. *A similar joint qualification program is underway for the corrector busbars (CB) that will service the ITER correction coils.

Skyscrapers flirting with the mist, hordes of bicycles on the street below ... modernity and ancestral tradition mixed in Shanghai where, for the first time in its 52-year history, the Symposium on Fusion Engineering (SOFE) was organized outside of the United States. Considered as one of the world's fastest-growing cities, Shanghai is also a major emitter of greenhouse gases. Now, more than ever, the city is interested in non-carbon-emitting sources of energy.   In this context, the IEEE Symposium on Fusion Engineering (SOFE 2017) moved outside of the United States for the first time in its 52-year history. The decision to go to China was testimony to the rapid growth of fusion research and advanced engineering in that country, as well as the growing participation of Chinese researchers in SOFE in recent years.   "Fusion has been international in all fields; the conference has always been international; the time had come to expand and move from the US," says Hutch Neilson, General Chair of the conference and head of Advanced Projects at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.  "The general excitement and the dynamism of the fusion community in Shanghai were an asset for the organization of the conference."   With close to 500 participants, 17 exhibitors, and 500 papers submitted, the conference had a record year, attracting fusion engineers from all over the world. "Our goal is to organize a conference to support fusion engineering and to develop networking, while raising the level of excellence," explains Hutch.    Like you were there! At the ITER stand, these students are trying out the Oculus Rift virtual reality system that makes you feel like you are hovering over the ITER construction site. And excellence there was. High-level representatives of the fusion community were invited to give plenary talks: ITER Director-General Bernard Bigot, who presented the current status of the ITER Project; Yuanxi Wan from Institute of Plasma Physics and University of Science and Technology in China, presenting the new design for their advanced fusion reactor CFETR; Yutaka Kamada, from QST Japan (National Institutes for Quantum and Radiological Science and Technology), presenting the status and progress of the superconducting JT-60SA tokamak; Gianfranco Federici, from EURfusion, presenting the progress in European research and design activity for DEMO; and Yuntao Song, ASIPP (China), presenting the technical progress of the EAST Tokamak ... to name a few.   All the talks had something in common, highlighting the various progress achieved in fusion research, the importance of international collaboration, and the enthusiasm of international players in the quest for fusion.    Well aware of the energy challenges the country is facing, the Chinese government has decided to accelerate the effort toward fusion electricity by developing an educational program dedicated to fusion science. ASIPP and the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) have developed a nuclear school, aiming at training future engineers. "We have very talented students who will be trained to operate the industrial tokamaks in the coming years," affirms Yungtao Song, from ASIPP.   20% of the 500 papers were submitted by students--outstanding participation that clearly reflects the growing interest and enthusiasm of the younger generation in fusion, according to organizers. In a general sense, students of all nationalities were on display at SOFE 2017, submitting 20 percent of the papers (109 student papers this year, up from 12 in 2015). At the closing ceremony, Martin DeJesus Nieto-Perez, professor investigator from Instituto Politecnico Nacional in Mexico, highlighted the "outstanding participation from students, that clearly reflects the growing interest and enthusiasm of the younger generation in fusion."   The next Symposium on Fusion Engineering will take place in 2019 in Jacksonville, Florida (US).

Over five kilometres of cryolines (5.5 km) will be necessary to deliver cryogenic cooling power to the main "clients" in the Tokamak Building—the ITER magnets (45 percent), the thermal shield (40 percent), and the cryopumps (15 percent). During operation, nearly 25 tonnes of liquid helium at minus 269 °C will circulate throughout the ITER installation. The ITER cryolines are a system of complex, multi-process, vacuum-insulated lines ranging from one to eight process pipes that will connect cryogenic components in the Tokamak Building to the cryoplant, where the required cooling power will be produced. The cryolines form part of the ITER cryodistribution system, which also comprises forced flow cold boxes, pumps, valves and manifolds. Under the responsibility of the Indian Domestic Agency the procurement of the cryolines has reached an important milestone. The first batch—nitrogen lines and relief lines totaling about 350 metres in length—has been produced and shipped in three 12-metre open-top containers. Special metallic frames were designed to ensure the secure transport of these items over sea and road.   On 17 May, a flag-off ceremony was held in Kalol at the supplier Inox India Limited in the presence of personnel from ITER India.The three containers are travelling on board the CMA CGM TOSCA that departed from the Jawaharlal Nehru Port near Mumbai on 3 June.   Other cryolines batches will be shipped in a similar manner over the next 18 months.

The Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE) in the UK is looking for people in the fusion community who could benefit from its new cloud-based computing facility, which has a capacity to crunch data that could help researchers and promote collaborative projects.  The CUMULUS Modular Data Centre, which opened in May, propels CCFE into the next era of supercomputing. With a total of 1128 cores, 18 terabytes of RAM and 170 TB of high performance storage—and the capacity to grow in sync with CCFE's need for computing power—the cloud-base system is also open to users across the international fusion community. Interested parties should contact Rob Akers at rob.akers@ukaea.uk.