Work packages for building the ITER installation are divided into tender batches (TB), which are packages of activities awarded by the European Domestic Agency for the design, construction and equipment of buildings or the realization of infrastructure. TB03 is the largest civil works contract of the ITER scientific installation, worth close to EUR 300 million. It was awarded in late 2012 to a consortium led by three major European companies—VINCI and Razel-Bec from France, and Ferrovial Agroman from Spain.   TB03 covers the construction of 12 buildings (including the Tokamak Complex, cryoplant, Assembly Hall, and Control Building) and several strategic structures such as the plant bridges that transport electrical power and cooling fluids to the machine.   150 kilos of bull meat slowly roast over the fire, with the ITER Assembly Hall in the background. Signed in December 2012, TB03 is now about half way to completion. Fully three million work hours have been executed by the consortium and its subcontractors.   This highly symbolic milestone called for a celebration. On Thursday 29 June, for the first time in four-and-a-half years, the ITER worksite came to a standstill in broad daylight, and at the invitation of the consortium 1,000 workers took off helmets, gloves and jackets to gather for a gargantuan barbecue.   At the invitation of the European consortium 1,000 workers took off helmets, gloves and jackets to gather for the giant party. On the menu: Spanish paella (400 kilos) and roasted bull meat (150 kilos) from the French Camargue region.   The TB03 contract should be fully executed in 2020. Young bulls beware ...

Sustained investment in "big science" projects is never easy due to the extended time frames, fluctuation of cost estimates, and inevitable risks. Yet time and time again, history has proven that great socioeconomic payoffs can result when national priorities are assigned and resources allocated in a stable and consistent manner.   The case is made by Mark Uhran, current Communications Manager for the US Domestic Agency, in a recent op-ed piece on the stimulation of transformative technologies.     Mark, who spent 28 years at the American space agency NASA, draws the parallel between the development of integrated circuits for US Apollo Program to land a human on the Moon with the procurement campaign for 2,800 tonnes of superconductors for the ITER Project.   In the first case, Apollo-driven consumption of largely untested and unknown integrated circuits in the early 1960s helped to spur the computer industry into further development and led to a multi-trillion dollar industrial revolution in microelectronic devices.   In the second, the largest-scale procurement of low-temperature superconductors in industrial history has created the conditions for a thriving high-temperature superconducting device market in the future due to the sheer scale of investment and realization.     Better and faster. Sustained investment in "big science" projects, US ITER Communications Manager Mark Uhran argues, can result in great socioeconomic payoff. Similar high-scale investments are underway for ITER in the areas of cryogenics, vacuum pumping, remote handling, power transmission systems, power conversion, high velocity fuel pellet injectors, control systems, and advanced diagnostics. Each of these technologies significantly advances the state-of-the-art in its respective domain and will represent new and unique industrial capabilities and capacities for those who invest in them, argues Mark.   "While the mission of the ITER Project is to demonstrate the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion energy for peaceful purposes, an objective of profound global impact in and of itself if the project succeeds, the implications for stimulating transformative technologies in parallel are still more compelling."   Read Mark Uhran's full op-ed piece here.

The view is familiar: a large Kaaba-like structure towering above a complex arrangement of walls and columns; a circular structure emerging from a carpet of iron rebar and steel plates; large and low buildings on each side; the hills and forest in the background. Yet, as days pass, everything changes: in large details and in small, the ITER worksite is in constant transformation. This picture, with its embedded captions, will help you map your way through the progress of ITER construction. 

After a one-month sea voyage from India and a brief trip along the roads of Provence, the first cryolines have been unloaded on site. Five kilometres of these complex multi-process vacuum-insulated lines will deliver cooling power from the cryoplant to systems that need it such as the ITER magnets and cryopumps.

Millions of watts of heating power can be delivered to the plasma using neutral beam injection—the work horse of ITER's external heating methods. A research and development program is underway to test the critical heating neutral beam components before the manufacturing phase is launched.   Neutral beam injection consists of shooting high-energy particles into the plasma. Outside of the ITER Tokamak, charged deuterium particles are accelerated to the required energy level and then passed through an "ion beam neutralizer" where their electrical charge is removed to allow them to penetrate the magnetic cage. At that stage, the high-velocity neutral particles can be injected into the heart of the plasma where, by way of rapid collision, they transfer their energy to the plasma particles.   One of the most critical components of the heating neutral beam injector is the beam source—composed of the radio frequency ion source and a seven-grid extractor and accelerator.   R&D ahead of operation Although neutral beams are routinely used in tokamak devices as the workhorses of auxiliary heating, ITER's neutral beams will be the first high-energy beams at 1 MV based on a negative ion source. Extensive R&D is underway to resolve the numerous technical challenges. The critical components of the heating neutral beam program are being developed at the Neutral Beam Test Facility (PRIMA) in Padua, Italy. Europe, Japan and India are contributing all components according to the specifications of Procurement Arrangements signed with the ITER Organization; Italy is building the facility at Consorzio RFX as a voluntary contribution to the neutral beam development program. Two test beds are under development—SPIDER (which will test and develop the ITER-scale radio-frequency negative ion source) and MITICA (where a full-power, full-energy beam will be tested at full pulse length in preparation for the heating neutral beam at ITER). The source generates 40 A of negative hydrogen or deuterium ions, which are then extracted and accelerated to 1MeV. These ions are converted further downstream in the injector to a "neutral" beam by neutralizing the ions in the gas cell neutralizer. After filtering out the remaining ions in the residual ion dump, neutrals are injected into the ITER plasma.   The heating neutral beam source—situated inside the neutral beam injector—is 3 metres wide, 3 metres deep and 4.5 metres high with a total weight of 15 tonnes. ITER will host two neutral beam injectors and space is reserved for a third in order to maintain an important potential for flexibility in the operation of the ITER facility should an upgrade be decided.   Over the last nine months, under the terms of a first-stage framework contract with the European Domestic Agency, three suppliers have been in competition to finalize the MITICA beam source (see box) build-to-print design and to initiate manufacturing documentation. This first stage has served to mitigate fabrication issues before the start of the manufacturing phase (stage two). One supplier will now be chosen for the manufacturing of the MITICA beam source, which is a prototype of the ITER heating neutral beam source.   The interim period between the two stages of the framework contract has offered a good opportunity to review the findings and share experience with various experts on beam sources. On 1 June, the ITER Neutral Beam Section reunited more than 25 experts—from the European, Japanese and Indian Domestic Agencies, Consorzio RFX, and laboratories—in Padua for a collaborative exchange based on the respective experience of each supplier with manufacturing, experimentation and prototyping.   The technical collaboration meeting on 1 June in Padua brought together ion source experts before the launch of the second-phase of beam source framework contract—manufacturing—which is planned to start at the end of the year. The objective was to ensure that all available expertise and knowledge for this critical component can be retrofitted into the manufacturing technical specifications. RFX Consorzio and the European Domestic Agency provided a detailed status of the technical improvements and feedback gained from suppliers during stage one and also highlighted the remaining open issues on which the ITER Organization is seeking advice from the ion source community.   India provided valuable feedback from the manufacturing of the diagnostic beam source (for example, achieving manufacturing tolerances of the beam source grids and positive results on the concept radio frequency coils). Experts from IPP Garching provided technical feedback on the type of radio frequency driver to use to prevent electrical breakdowns and the use of molybdenum coating based on the results from its experimental test beds BATMAN and ELISE.   From this fruitful discussion, held in a very collaborative atmosphere, several identified actions will now be tracked to directly benefit the ITER/MITICA beam source project, leading to higher confidence for the launch of the manufacturing phase of the MITICA heating neutral beam source.

At the Swiss Plasma Center in Lausanne, Switzerland, the TCV tokamak was recently shut down for an upgrade of its Thomson scattering diagnostic. The operation was successful: shortly after commissioning the first measurements demonstrated greatly enhanced spatial and spectral resolution for the temperature and density profile measurements of TCV plasmas. TCV is a variable configuration tokamak with highly specialized capabilities (plasma shaping, versatile electron cyclotron heating, measurement, control systems) for the exploration of the physics of magnetically confined plasmas. See the full article on the EPFL/Swiss Plasma Center website.