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​The Conseil général, the executive body of the French départements recently had their name changes to Conseil départemental. In Bouches-du-Rhône, the département that is home to ITER, this change in name was accompanied by a change in president.

Since 2 April and for the first time in 225 years, a woman, Martine Vassal from Marseille, sits in the presidential seat. On 6 May, she paid an official visit to ITER in order to reaffirm the département's support to the project (Bouches-du-Rhône contributes 152 million EUR to ITER).   "We are committed to ITER and determined to stand along with you in this great venture", she said to ITER Director-General Bernard Bigot before taking a tour of the construction site. President Vassal with Vice-President Gazay (centre) and DG Bigot on the ITER site.

​View this spectacular video of the ITER site seen from a drone's point of view. (Produced in April by the European Domestic Agency.)

​The April issue of the WEST Newsletter (09) can be downloaded here.

The 2nd WEST Governing Board took place on March 5, 2015. WEST international partners have come from China, Europe, India, Japan, Korea and USA to share the progress on the project, joining efforts to achieve the common objective : first plasma in 2016.

Series production launched for complementary divertor components. In addition to the ITER-like prototypes to be tested in WEST, the divertor is constituted of complementary elements based on alternative technologies. The series production of these key plasma-facing components has been launched.

New European partners for WEST. On March 4, 2015, two European laboratories, KIT (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany) and IPP.CR (Institute of Plasma Physics, Czech Republic) signed a Letter Of Intent to join the collaboration on the WEST project.

​In this new video the European agency for ITER Fusion for Energy recaps the main progress achieved in ITER construction in 2014 and presents the activities for the year ahead.

"2015 is the year of construction," says Romaric Darbour, F4E's Deputy Project Manager. "The works for ten new buildings or facilities will start, including the cryoplant, buildings for magnet power conversion and radio frequency heating, the cooling towers; cleaning facilities and the control building. The construction of the second floor of the Tokamak Building is also expected to begin this summer."

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Anne White has always relished challenges. As an undergraduate, she was fascinated by fluid dynamics, and the prospect of nuclear fusion as a game-changing energy source. She followed those passions to her current position as the Cecil and Ida Green Associate Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT, where she spends much of her time studying plasma turbulence — which is a challenge unto itself. "I like it because it's really difficult," she says. "You take fluid turbulence and add electrical and magnetic fields, which make it even harder to understand. Then you heat it to 100 million degrees and have to figure out ways to measure it and see what it's doing. That's why I'm at home here at MIT — everyone's really excited about tough things."

Read more on the MIT News webpage.