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​Wildlife is thriving on the ITER site. Wild boars, mouflon goats and deer freely roam the vast expanses of forest that surround the installation.

This picture of two young does was taken last week by APAVE's Health and Safety Coordinator Laurent Feron, as he drove along the track leading to the Logistics Platform located behind the hill on the east side of the worksite.

These does are no ordinary animals — they are descendants of the two pairs of Sikka deer that were offered to French President Sadi Carnot by the Emperor of Japan Mutsuhito, the "Meiji Emperor", in 1890. The two couples were originally hosted in the Presidential Hunting Reserve near Paris. By 1928, the original four had become a small herd, and a few individuals were entrusted to various national parks and wildlife reservations. The National Forest in Cadarache was one of them. Eighty-six years later, the Emperor's deer are still here, scattered between the CEA-Cadarache enclosure, the National Forestry Commission reserve and the outskirts of the ITER site.  

​From 20-22 May 2015 the ENERGY, SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY Conference and Exhibition (EST-Energy) will be taking place at the Karlsruhe Convention Center in Germany.

The conference will focus on all energy-related topics with an emphasis on renewable and CO2-free forms of energy.

The establishment of a sustainable, reliable and achievable energy system needs a worldwide cross-linked effort. Research, development and implementation of innovations by both the scientific community as well as industry is necessary. EST-Energy 2015 aims to provide a platform for the most recent research findings and allow participants to network with other researchers and engineers from all over the world.

Fusion is one of the themes of the conference. A call for abstracts has been launched for topics that fall in the following categories: ITER- and DEMO-related issues, the development strategies of new fusion devices (W7-X, JT-60 SA... ), and technical issues that may be of interest to others.

The deadline for paper abstracts is 15 December 2014. All information can be found on the conference website.

​Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers, in collaboration with General Atomics and the University of Arizona, have developed an infrared and visible camera viewing system that's able to produce wide-angle, tangential views of full poloidal (north-south direction of the magnetic field) cross-sections inside the tokamak. The camera's images provide researchers with data about the interior conditions of the DIII-D, which was built under contract for the US Department of Energy.

"We wanted to look inside the tokamak's chamber to see where things were heating up on the walls," said Kevin Morris, a designer with LLNL's National Security Engineer Division, who was part of the research team that developed the camera system. "There are a lot of critical areas that are heated by the plasma, and researchers want to understand them better."   ... The camera system consists of a commercially available infrared camera, a fast visible camera and an optical system designed by a collaboration of physicists, engineers, optical designers and mechanical designers.   Their design will be used as a prototype for a set of larger cameras that will be built for ITER.

Read the full story on the LLNL website here.