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Registration is open now for the 11th ITER International School. This in-person event will be held from 25 to 29 July 2022 at the University of California San Diego, hosted by the U.S. Burning Plasma Organization, the ITER Organization, UC San Diego, and General Atomics.

The subject of this year's school is "ITER Plasma Scenarios and Control." As the start of ITER operation approaches, it is timely to address this challenging multidisciplinary topic: the development of integrated operating scenarios and required plasma control to facilitate the ITER goals, particularly for plasmas self-heated by fusion-born alpha particles.

Most attendees will be graduate students, post-doctoral researchers, and early career faculty and research staff working in fields relevant to the ITER program. Although the agenda will focus on topics of scenarios and control, attendees are not required to be working in these subfields. All nationalities, whether representing an ITER Member or not, are welcome.

The ITER International School is organized regularly with the goal of giving young scientists and engineers a taste of the stimulating, multi-disciplinary and challenging field that is nuclear fusion.

For all information on the 2022 edition and to register, see this webpage.

The B1M—the world's largest, most subscribed-to video channel for construction—aims to inspire people to join the construction industry by showcasing the incredible projects and feats of engineering it delivers.

In March 2022, the team came to ITER. The result is an entertaining and educational nine-minute video that takes you into the very heart of ITER machine construction. "This is so much more than just an energy project; it's a $22 billion science experiment between a whole host of nations all coming together to try and change how we generate power on this planet," says host Fred Mills as he guides the viewer through a maze of components and tooling in the ITER Assembly Hall.

Colette Ricketts, deputy head of the ITER Project Control Office, also makes a cameo appearance to explain how the arrival of components from the ITER Members is planned and managed ... and re-planned if necessary, as when international events have an unexpected effect on manufacturing or shipping.

"It's a pretty nuclear level of project collaboration," says the B1M team. "It's kind of like building a LEGO kit ... just 10 million times more complicated."

Watch "We Went Inside the Largest Nuclear Fusion Reactor" on YouTube here.

Donato Lioce, head of ITER's Tokamak Cooling Water System Section, describes the plant system that will remove heat from the ITER machine and in-vessel components as "absolutely unique."

One of its peculiarities is the sheer volume of equipment—which is absolutely huge compared to the cooling system in a nuclear fission plant. More than 6,000 tonnes of equipment, 43 kilometres of piping, 3,000 valves, heat exchangers, pumps ... all housed over the seven levels in the Tokamak Building. Another is the fact that the system is designed not only to cool, but also to heat: the same equipment that circulates cooling water can also circulate hot water to "bake" tokamak components before plasma operation, or hot gas to "dry" components before maintenance. The cyclical nature of the ITER machine, designed for 30,000 plasma pulses, also has repercussions for the design of the tokamak cooling water system and its hundreds of clients.

Follow along as Donato describes in detail the different functionalities of the ITER tokamak cooling water system, system equipment, and the procurement effort that is underway now.

Watch the eighth episode of ITER Talks here. 

See the full ITER Talks playlist on YouTube here.