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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.

The world of fusion energy is a world of extremes. For instance, the center of the ultrahot plasma contained within the walls of doughnut-shaped fusion machines known as tokamaks can reach temperatures well above the 15 million degrees Celsius core of the sun. And even though the portion of the plasma closer to the tokamak's inner walls is 10 to 20 times cooler, it still has enough energy to erode the layer of liquid lithium that may be used to coat components that face the plasma in future tokamaks. Scientists thus seek to know how to prevent hot plasma particles from eroding the protective lithium coating.

Physicist Tyler Abrams has led experiments on a facility in the Netherlands called Magnum-PSI that could provide an answer. The research, published in Nuclear Fusion in December 2015, found that combining lithium with the hydrogen isotope deuterium substantially reduced the erosion. Abrams conducted the research as a doctoral student in the Princeton Program in Plasma Physics substantially based at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL). He currently is a postdoctoral research fellow at General Atomics. The research was funded by the DOE Office of Science.

Read the full article on the PPPL website.

The European Domestic Agency has developed a new numerical model that represents ITER's 18 toroidal field magnets with remarkable detail. The model will be used to compute the magnetic fields produced by the coils and the resulting electromagnetic forces on the magnet system, which are the result of the interaction between electrical currents and the magnetic field.

"It's the first time we have a complete model of the entire ITER toroidal field system to such a level of detail," says Gabriele D'Amico, the technical support officer responsible for the development of the model. "The level of complexity of the tool is outstanding. For example there are more than 1,500 bolts connecting the different pieces of the toroidal field magnet system, and the model allows us to predict the behaviour of each one during operations."

The model, which took six months to develop, will allow the European Domestic Agency and the ITER Organization to simulate different scenarios using an approach that integrates the 18 coils and all major subsystems. Scientists will be able to study the occurrence of an electrical fault during operation, for example, or the impact of possible misalignment in the assembly of the coils on the behaviour of the whole system.

Read the full article on the European Domestic Agency website.