The Assembly & Operations Division achieved an important milestone at the end of 2014, as it completed the last volume in a suite of management plans for the assembly of the ITER Tokamak and the installation of plant systems.   These plans define how the works will be organized and managed on the site in the next phase of the project—once the buildings are completed and handed over by the European Domestic Agency. The ITER Organization then has full responsibility for the integration, assembly and testing of components delivered to the ITER site by the seven ITER Members.   The plans describe the Organization's overarching vision of how it will prepare, manage, control and complete the construction of millions of pieces that make up the ITER Tokamak and plant systems (electrical, cooling, fuelling, heating and diagnostic systems).   "These documents form the basis of Assembly & Operations work today and for the next 18 to 24 months," says Steve Gilligan, the Assembly & Planning Responsible Officer in charge of elaborating the 450 pages of the Construction Project Management Plan. "They allow the Division to implement an assembly baseline, prepare contracts, and get industry on board to start the work."   The 17 volumes of the plan form the basis of Assembly & Operations work today and for the next 18 to 24 months, allowing the Division to implement an assembly baseline, prepare contracts, and get industry on board to start the work. The 17 volumes of the plan were reviewed one by one through ITER's Management and Quality Program—a key process for a licenced basic nuclear facility.   "Our management plan reflects lessons learned in other huge construction and assembly projects," says Steve. "We have collected 'return on experience' data and consulted the best experts from industry and projects around the world to learn lessons. These have then been tailored to meet the special complexities of ITER, to ensure that what we'll go forward with is correct for a project like ITER."   Whether describing the management of human resources, safety, requirements, cost or change control, each volume of the management plan is functionally written, detailing the required actions during the phase leading up to assembly (front-end planning), working alongside industry during execution, and finally when the testing is complete and the facility is turned over for operations.   The plan will now be further developed through ITER's continuous improvement strategy, and underpinned through detailed working instructions, templates and guidelines.   "These plans define an effective and consistent management approach and processes for the ITER Organization, Domestic Agencies and their contractors during assembly, installation and testing," says Rem Haange, head of the ITER Project Department. "My experience shows that when it comes to assembling something as hugely complex as the ITER machine, very detailed, accurate planning is essential for smoother assembly operations and to reach our ultimate goal—to demonstrate the feasibility of fusion energy—more quickly."

Since September of last year, the first components of the ITER machine have been arriving at the construction site. For the time being, the crates, drums and boxes stored in the temporary storage facilities are easy to manage and easy to identify. But the storage facilities will soon be filled with hundreds of thousands of pieces of equipment—some as small as screws and bolts and some much larger, like the recent delivery of a transformer weighing 87 tonnes. To help with the complex and daunting task of managing the components at the ITER site, the ITER Organization is implementing a set of software solutions from Intergraph, a global software supplier to the power, process and marine industries. These software solutions will not only help manage the components during construction and testing, but will also cover all technical documentation and data created during this time period. Intergraph SmartPlant Materials was in place for the first in-kind deliveries to the ITER construction site—high voltage electrical equipment supplied by the US Domestic Agency in September. The data for every single component that will arrive on the site needs to be captured in advance and the shipments need tracked from the factory to the ITER site (through a live data feed received from Daher, ITER's Global Logistics Partner). When the delivery trucks arrive, the details of the components are checked and preparations are made for final inspection and warehousing.  The data on each component is then ready to be interfaced to another Intergraph product, SmartPlant Construction (SPC), which will be ready to use later this year. This software solution manages workface planning, meaning that it will plan and track the future construction work in accordance with the project schedule. For each package of work, it will enable the planners to determine the actual availability of required materials and will automatically reserve them for construction when needed. In addition, a third Intergraph system—SmartPlant for Owner Operators— is being implemented at ITER to cover technical documentation and data management for the testing, commissioning and operation phase of the project. The ITER Organization has signed a contract with Intergraph for five years, with options to extend further so that ITER will be fully supported well into the construction phase of the project.

Is it hard for companies to get involved in ITER? Let's hear from some of those that have been awarded contracts for ITER construction and manufacturing. In a series of videos, the European Domestic Agency talks with representatives of large European companies or consortia that are contributing their knowhow and expertise to the project. What drives them forward and keeps them committed? What new markets do they expect as a result of ITER participation? What R&D and technological advances have resulted from work done for ITER? A how-to video has also been produced to explain to potential bidders where to find information about European tenders and to demystify the different steps of the European procurement process. You can access the videos on YouTube.

The ITER Business Forum 2015 (IBF/15) will take place in Marseille, France from 25 to 27 March 2015. Already, 256 participants from 135 companies have registered to participate. IBF/15 is a unique occasion for companies to approach the ITER Project and to investigate possibilities for involvement or partnership around upcoming tender offers. Key project actors will present the status of systems. Twelve thematic workshops with presentations will be given by the ITER Organization, the procurement agencies for ITER—the Domestic Agencies—and key suppliers. Visit the IBF/15 website for registration information.

The JET machine area is a hive of activity as the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE) prepares the facility on behalf of EUROfusion for its next run of experiments later in 2015. The shutdown period is an opportunity for engineers to tune up key systems on JET and to install new components to improve the tokamak's performance. This time round, the focus is on plasma fuelling and heating systems. The high frequency pellet injector, which propels frozen deuterium fuel into the JET plasma, is being optimized and repositioned to achieve more reliable operation. A refurbished antenna—the ion cyclotron resonance heating system, which produces radiowaves that resonate with the plasma particles and heat them up—will also be plugged in. JET's antenna is similar to the one that the next-step ITER Tokamak will use. Bringing it back online will mean that experiments can simulate ITER conditions more accurately, and has the added advantage of helping to flush out impurities from the core of the plasma. European fusion researchers are keen to see how the 2014 JET tests have left their mark on the machine. The shutdown is enabling CCFE's team of remote handling engineers to remove sample tiles from the interior of JET so their condition can be analyzed. Inspecting the tiles will yield valuable information about how the beryllium and tungsten wall lining is being affected by its close proximity to the plasma (another hot topic for ITER). And a remote-controlled vacuum cleaner has been inside JET collecting dust which can also give pointers on the interaction between the plasma and the wall materials. In a similar vein, a new high-resolution camera has just been taken into the JET chamber to photograph the tiles in the divertor region. In this area, as the name suggests, impurities and waste material are diverted out of the plasma, and the tungsten surfaces of the divertor are exposed to intense heat as a result. The photographic survey is giving scientists the most detailed pictures yet of the condition of this area of the machine. Read the full article on the CCFE website here.

The JET and Medium-Size Tokamaks General Planning Meeting was held in January in Lausanne at the Olympic Museum. The conference was a major step towards the internationalization of the TCV tokamak at EPFL (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne).   The EUROfusion Consortium is the umbrella organization of all fusion research laboratories in Europe including Switzerland. Tasked with building the roadmap to ITER and DEMO, the prototype of a fusion commercial reactor, it provides the work platform for exploiting the Joint European Torus (JET) in the UK, sometimes referred to as "little ITER." EPFL's TCV tokamak carries out important experimental work in fusion, focusing on different plasma confinements and shapes.    The Planning Meeting, organized by the Center for Research in Plasma Physics (CRPP), which runs the TCV, focused on proposals for experiments aligned with the EUROfusion roadmap and that could be performed in 2015 on the roadmap's dedicated devices: JET, ASDEX Upgrade and EPFL's TCV. Scientists presented their views of a comprehensive experimental strategy, which was discussed by the almost 150 senior scientists attending the conference.   The selected experiments will be performed on EUROfusion's different devices by international groups of physicists. The plan calls for the TCV to be used for almost two months in 2015 and early 2016, while it will also continue to operate for EPFL's own research goals, which are generally also aligned with the ITER roadmap.   The conference included a visit of the TCV, followed by a reception at the CRPP's site.   Read the full article on the EPFL website. See also the report from EUROfusion.   --Photo: EPFL, Alain Herzog