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​The European Domestic Agency for ITER has published a highlights document that retraces one year of activity and progress. Contract signatures, industrial achievements, events, construction milestones and fusion R&D activities are gathered in an illustrated 50-page brochure that is downloadable here.

Visit the European Domestic Agency website for more information.

Imagine a world powered by a cheap, safe, clean, virtually limitless, sustainable fuel source such as water. If fuel and energy are cheap and available to all nations, that reduces global political tensions. If our energy comes from a clean-burning fuel source, that reduces air pollution. All that would be good, right?

Billionaires such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen apparently think so. They've each thrown their money into a different fusion development company, each with its own idea how to solve the fusion puzzle, according to Forbes. "What we're really doing here is trying to build a star on Earth," said Laban Coblentz at the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), a massive fusion reactor being built by 35 countries in southern France. When Coblentz said "star," he meant that quite literally. Fusion is what keeps stars, including our own sun, burning bright. Photo: "When we succeed, it will be for the benefit of the whole world," says ITER Engineer Anna Encheva in the CNN program. Follow this link to the CNN program.

The 3rd Joint Coordination Meeting (JCM-3) in fusion R&D and related areas took place between China and Korea in Xi'an, China from 13 to 14 August.

Gathering government officials, scientists and engineers from national research institutes, industries participating in ITER and the Chinese and Korean Domestic Agencies, the meeting was hosted by the Department of International Cooperation of the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology MOST and ITER China, with support from Western Superconducting Technologies—a supplier of ITER China located in Xián.   At the meeting, the current status of the Chinese and Korean fusion programs was passed in review as well as reports from bilateral working groups on the collaborative activities of the previous year. In 2014, China and Korea collaborated in the areas of tungsten wall/divertor and plasma-wall interaction; DEMO reactor design; lower hybrid current drive (LHCD) physics and technology; and ITER procurements including blanket shield blocks, AC/DC convertors and Test Blanket Modules.   The next bilateral meeting will take place in August 2016 in Korea.

​General Atomics (San Diego) opened a facility making the world's largest magnets for rare public tours on 2 October in honour of the nationwide Manufacturing Day in the US.

The factory in Poway, California, is making seven giant magnet modules, each weighing approximately 110 metric tons, for the $20 billion International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER, being built in France.

Each magnet is made of 560 turns of superconducting cables made from stands of a rare niobium-tin alloy wound around a tube that will carry liquid helium. In operation, the magnets will be cooled to -269°C while 50,000 amps of power are applied.   Their role in the ITER Project is to contain a fusion reaction — literally trapping the sun in a bottle.  

Photo by Chris Jennewein

Read the full article in the Times of San Diego.

​On 28 September, the last lengths of Russian-procured conductor for ITER's toroidal field magnets were loaded onto trailers at the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow for shipment to the European winding facility in La Spezia, Italy.

Through a Procurement Arrangement signed in February 2008 with the ITER Organization, the Russian Domestic Agency took on the responsibility of procuring 20 percent of toroidal field conductor lengths (28 lengths, including two dummies), plus testing and transport to the European winding facility.

The building blocks of the ITER magnets are high-performance, internally cooled superconductors called CICC (cable-in-conduit) conductors, made up of bundled superconducting and copper strands that are cabled together and contained in a structural steel jacket. For the toroidal field magnets, the completed conductor will be wound into D-shaped "double pancakes," inserted into the grooves of a radial plate to hold it in place, stacked to form winding "packs," and finally contained in steel cases to form the completed coil.

The shipment of three final lengths procured in Russia (pictured) completes Russia's longest-lead procurement campaign for ITER.

-- Alex Petrov, ITER Russia