The European Joint Undertaking for the ITER Fusion energy organization and the development of fusion energy has been established by the Council of the European Union at its meeting in Brussels on 27 March. The Joint Undertaking will form the European Domestic Agency that will manage the EU’s contribution to ITER. Switzerland is in the process of extending its accession to the ELE and ITER (via Euratom).

The preparation of the ITER site has started on 29 January. Until October 2007, a site of 180 hectares next to the Cadarache site will be prepared for the construction of ITER, under the supervision of the Agence ITER France.

The Director General (DG) of ITER is the Chief Executive Officer of the ITER Organisation. The DG is responsible to the Council for its efficient execution. The DG therefore supervises the appointment of its staff and their work, and works with the Council to obtain resources and resolve any problems. Currently, the ITER DG Nominee is Kaname Ikeda.

The Project Team is responsible for executing the project and coordinating the procurements, machine assembly and eventual operation. It consists of directly employed staff and staff seconded by the Parties. Staff are appointed on renewable five-year contracts, allowing the needs of the project to be adapted as it proceeds. The Project Team is mainly located at the Cadarache construction site. The DG heads major divisions for Safety, Licensing and QA, for Administration, and for Science and Technology, the latter being a major point of interaction for ITER’s future plasma physics and nuclear technology customers.

The Plasma Physics Research Centre (CRPP) is a Centre in the Faculty of Basic Sciences of the EPFL. Its 135 strong staff, 110 on the EPFL site and the rest at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), includes 22 nationalities, illustrating the international nature of our field of research. The CRPP is a National Competence Centre in the field of Plasma Physics. In addition to plasma physics teaching, its missions are primarily scientific research in the field of controlled fusion within the framework of the EURATOM-Swiss Confederation Association and the development of its expertise as well as technology transfer in the field of materials research. As the body responsible for all scientific work on controlled fusion in Switzerland, the CRPP plays a national role of international importance.

The European Joint Undertaking for the ITER Fusion energy organization and the development of fusion energy has been established by the Council of the European Union at its meeting in Brussels on 27 March. The Joint Undertaking will form the European Domestic Agency that will manage the EU’s contribution to ITER. Switzerland is in the process of extending its accession to the ELE and ITER (via Euratom).

Euratom’s EFDA has three locations, which each house a so-called Close Support Unit (CSU), responsible for one or more of EFDAs activities. The EFDA-CSU Garching is located in Garching, near Munich (Germany), and is hosted by the German Max-Planck Institut für Plasmaphysik. EFDA-CSU Culham is hosted by the UKAEA laboratory in Culham (UK), home of JET. Finally, EFDA-CSU Barcelona is hosted by the Spanish fusion laboratory CIEMAT in Barcelona (Spain).

On Monday 5 February in Tokyo, the Euratom and the Japanese government signed the “Broader Approach” agreement that was initialled on 22 November 2006, the day after the signing of the ITER agreement in Paris. This agreement is part of the deal hammered out during the site decision process, defining a “previlidged partnership” for Japan and setting out the work to be carried out jointly by the EU and Japan in support of ITER. The EU/Japan agreement lasts 10 years and represents some 340 million Euro of European investment. The cooperation aims to complement the ITER Project and to accelarate the realisation of fusion energy as a clean and sustainable energy source, by carrying out R&D and developing some advanced technologies for a future demonstration fusion power reactor (DEMO).

The Director General (DG) of ITER is the Chief Executive Officer of the ITER Organisation. The DG is responsible to the Council for its efficient execution. The DG therefore supervises the appointment of its staff and their work, and works with the Council to obtain resources and resolve any problems.

Currently, the ITER DG Nominee is Kaname Ikeda.The Project Team is responsible for executing the project and coordinating the procurements, machine assembly and eventual operation. It consists of directly employed staff and staff seconded by the Parties. Staff are appointed on renewable five-year contracts, allowing the needs of the project to be adapted as it proceeds.
The Project Team is mainly located at the Cadarache construction site. The DG heads major divisions for Safety, Licensing and QA, for Administration, and for Science and Technology, the latter being a major point of interaction for ITER’s future plasma physics and nuclear technology customers.

On Monday 5 February in Tokyo, the Euratom and the Japanese government signed the”Broader Approach” agreement that was initialled on 22 November 2006, the day after the signing of the ITER agreement in Paris. This agreement is part of the deal hammered out during the site decision process, defining a “previlidged partnership” for Japan and setting out the work to be carried out jointly by the EU and Japan in support of ITER.

The EU/Japan agreement lasts 10 years and represents some 340 million Euro of European investment. The cooperation aims to complement the ITER Project and to accelarate the realisation of fusion energy as a clean and sustainable energy source, by carrying out R&D and developing some advanced technologies for a future demonstration fusion power reactor (DEMO).

The preparation of the ITER site has started on 29 January. Until October 2007, a site of 180 hectares next to the Cadarache site will be prepared for the construction of ITER, under the supervision of the Agence ITER France.

Euratom’s EFDA has three locations, which each house a so-called Close Support Unit (CSU), responsible for one or more of EFDAs activities. The EFDA-CSU Garching is located in Garching, near Munich (Germany), and is hosted by the German Max-Planck Institut für Plasmaphysik. EFDA-CSU Culham is hosted by the UKAEA laboratory in Culham (UK), home of JET. Finally, EFDA-CSU Barcelona is hosted by the Spanish fusion laboratory CIEMAT in Barcelona (Spain).

The European Joint Undertaking for the ITER Fusion energy organization and the development of fusion energy has been established by the Council of the European Union at its meeting in Brussels on 27 March. The Joint Undertaking will form the European Domestic Agency that will manage the EU’s contribution to ITER. Switzerland is in the process of extending its accession to the ELE and ITER (via Euratom).

On Monday 5 February in Tokyo, the Euratom and the Japanese government signed the “Broader Approach” agreement that was initialled on 22 November 2006, the day after the signing of the ITER agreement in Paris. This agreement is part of the deal hammered out during the site decision process, defining a “previlidged partnership” for Japan and setting out the work to be carried out jointly by the EU and Japan in support of ITER. The EU/Japan agreement lasts 10 years and represents some 340 million Euro of European investment. The cooperation aims to complement the ITER Project and to accelarate the realisation of fusion energy as a clean and sustainable energy source, by carrying out R&D and developing some advanced technologies for a future demonstration fusion power reactor (DEMO).

The Broader Approach is a concept that was originally invented as a means of resolving the deadlock in the decision process of the ITER site. It has since grown into the development of a broader approach to fusion development, being recognised that the necessary information needed for the construction of a power reactor will not be provided by ITER alone. Therefore complementary facilities and activities will be needed in order to accelerate the development of magnetic fusion. These include:

• a remote experimental control centre as an alternate focus for interaction with ITER;
• a virtual plasma modelling laboratory, to bring together models for plasma behaviour on ITER and to make predictions, feeding back information subsequently from ITER operation;
• a “satellite” tokamak providing support (and the ability to rapidly evaluate new ideas) during ITER construction and operation;
• the DEMO design team;
• a DEMO materials test/qualification facility (IFMIF).

The most important element in the above list is the materials test facility, without which it will be difficult to qualify the structural materials needed to license DEMO. A change in these materials is necessary for the higher neutron fluences to be experienced in the devices following ITER. Although the materials will be tested in ITER operation in the test blanket modules, little information on their endurance will be available from ITER, due to its low accumulation rate for neutron damage.

The other facilities will allow ITER to do more, sooner, by providing the ability to conduct experiments for longer periods per day, and by increasing the speed of understanding and exploiting any new phenomena ITER reveals.

As a result of the agreement on the construction site for ITER, Japan and Europe have both agreed to make contributions of 49 B¥/339 M€ (May 2005 values) to projects from the above list (or other suitable projects) to be sited in Japan. These will be open also to the other future ITER Parties to co-fund and join in participation.

While significant progress has been made with large fusion experiments around the world, most of which were constructed in the 80´s, it was clear from an early stage that a larger and more powerful device would be needed to create the conditions expected in a fusion reactor and to demonstrate its scientific and technical feasibility, and each of the fusion programmes around the world started to make their own design for it.

The idea for ITER originated from the Geneva superpower summit in November 1985 where Premier Gorbachov, following discussions with President Mitterand of France, proposed to President Reagan that an international project be set up to develop fusion energy for peaceful purposes. The ITER-project subsequently began as a collaboration between the former Soviet Union, the USA, the European Union (via Euratom) and Japan.

Site selection

The process of selecting a location for ITER took a long time, and was finally successfully concluded in 2005. Canada was first to offer a site in Clarington, in May 2001. Soon after, Japan proposed the Rokkasho-Mura site, Spain offered a site at Vandellos near Barcelona, and France proposed the Cadarache site in the South of France.

Canada withdrew from the race in 2003, and the EU decided in November 2003 to concentrate its support on a single European site, for which the French site Cadarache was chosen. From that point onwards, the choice was between France and Japan. On June 28, 2005 it was officially announced that ITER will be built in the European Union, at the Cadarache site.

As part of the deal over the siting, it was agreed that Japan would provide 20% of the staff for the ITER project, and Europe would make a fifth of its procurements in Japan. In addition, the head of the project would be proposed by Japan, and Japan and Europe would work together on a “broader approach” including the other programmatic items which would be necessary to build a demonstration power plant in Japan after ITER, such as materials qualification, advanced plasma experimentation, plasma simulation, and the design team itself.

The future for ITER essentially falls into four phases:

• the phase prior to the granting of the construction license, in which the Joint Implementation Agreement is eventually signed or ratified and the ITER Organisation is set up;
• the estimated seven year construction phase in which the first large hardware contracts are launched (some subcomponent procurements uncritical for licensing may even be launched earlier) and in which eventually all subsystems are assembled and coommisioned;
• the estimated 21 year operation phase in which one year of integrated system commissioning is followed by 10 years of operation aiming primarlly at establishing the optimum physics of a power reactor and determining the best operating mode to obtain the most relevant tritium-breeding blanket testing, followed by a 10 year operation phase to exploit those conditions;
• a decommissioning phase, the first 6 years of which being the final responsibility of the ITER project, to deactivate the plant by removal of tritiated materials, activated corrosion products and radioactive dust, as well as in-vessel components, followed by about 20 further years (minimum) under the responsibility of the host Party allowing for radioactive decay, and a further 6 year period of dismantlement and disposal of the remaining plant.