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Critics may argue that the reality of fusion power is always 30 years away, but as this special supplement to Physics World proves, there is much progress being made towards that goal. The €5bn ITER project lies at the heart of attempts to develop the technology required to make fusion power a viable energy option. A brief history of the project (p9) reveals its sometimes tortured path to its home in Cadarache in the south of France. Across the Channel, the UK has a long and distinguished history in fusion research, with the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) playing a key role through its work at the Culham Science Centre in Oxfordshire. The new director of the authority, Steven Cowley, reveals how he thinks that UK researchers still have much to offer in exploring the science needed for ITER to succeed (p5). Placing the UK at the heart of the fusion economy is also the goal of the UKAEA’s fusion and industry team led by Dan Mistry, as he outlines the opportunities for UK businesses to get involved in the potentially multimillion Euro contracts available to support the development of ITER (p11). The UK has already made a foray into Europe with the installation of the former Culham-based COMPASS tokamak in the Czech Republic. Jan Mlynár and Radomír Pánek describe how the move has helped put their country at the forefront of European fusion research (p14). The success of ITER will be due in no small part to the people involved in the project. As nuclear physicist Mike Loughlin reveals, the job opportunities available to those working on the project are as varied and exciting as any in physics (p16). Fusion power may yet be some years away, but the challenges that ITER poses and the opportunities for both science and industry that it offers right now are not to be missed.

Fusion challenges and solutions

ContentsNew UKAEA director awaits ITER 5Steven Cowley discusses his new role and how he intends to keep the UK ahead of the pack in fusion technology.

The rocky road to ITER 9Tracing the timeline of the ITER project, from initial idea to ground-breaking in the south of France, with all the setbacks and successes along the way.

Industrial procurement in fusion 11ITER offers significant opportunities for UK firms to get involved in the business of fusion energy. Dan Mistry offers guidance on how companies can compete for contracts.

Tracking ITER with COMPASS 14From Culham to Prague, Jan Mlynár and Radomír Pánek plot the journey of the COMPASS tokamak and reveal how it has revitalized fusion science in the Czech Republic.

ITER attracts all kinds of physicists 16Mike Loughlin describes life as a physicist working on ITER, and outlines the options for others wanting to follow his lead.

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F u s i o n C h a l l e n g e s a n d s o l u t i o n s o C t o b e r 2 0 0 8 5

Steven Cowley outlines how the UK is keeping ahead in fusion technology.

New UKAEA director awaits ITER

The United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) Fusion Association at the Culham Science Centre in Oxfordshire is home to the UK’s fusion programme. Last month, Steven Cowley took up his post as director of UKAEA Culham, after holding joint positions as head of the plasma-physics group at Imperial College London and professor of theoretical physics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Partly funded by the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and by the European Atomic Energy Community (EURATOM), UKAEA Culham operates two main fusion-research programmes: the Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak (MAST) and the Joint European Torus (JET). MAST explores the potential of using a spheri-cal tokamak as a route to fusion power and receives 75% of its funding from the EPSRC, with the rest from EURATOM. JET, funded in the main by EURATOM, is the flagship of the European fusion programme, operated by UKAEA on behalf of its European partners. JET carries out tests that will feed into the development of its successor, ITER, an interna-tional project being built in southern France that is designed to demonstrate the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion power plants.

What first drew you into plasma physics and fusion research?Fusion is a great field in which to do science. When you are young, you want to go into an area with huge potential and to see your efforts rewarded by great discoveries. The field of plasma science did not exist before fusion, so in order to do fusion we had to invent another branch of physics. I wanted to go into an area with potential, and fusion seemed to be a good choice. It was also good timing. When I was starting my PhD at Princeton University in the early 1980s, JET was being built at Culham, so it was an exciting time in fusion research.

What does the role of director at Culham involve?First, it involves scientific leadership and making good, informed decisions. For example, right now we are design-ing an exhaust system for a major upgrade of MAST and have to decide which concept is best. Second, it involves motivating people to do their best. Fusion is about getting lots of people to think very cleverly. There is no longer any question that we can do fusion, so, as director, I need to find good people and motivate them to make breakthroughs. A lot of public money has gone into fusion and the public should know what we are doing, so it’s also about commu-nicating our results.

We have around 550 people working in fusion, of whom about 130 are physicists. The fun with this job is being able to work at the forefront of fusion science with good people and on exciting experiments.

Which aspects of fusion research does Culham specialize in? Culham has two of the world’s leading fusion experiments. We have the world’s best machine in JET and most innovative machine in MAST. JET is the only machine in the world that uses tritium in the plasma, and because ITER, its successor, will also use tritium, this places us at the centre of research to produce scientific input for ITER. We are also developing parts of ITER here at Culham – the radio-frequency anten-nas for heating the plasma are one example – and we have a dedicated group supporting UK industry because we want those firms to play a role in building ITER.

What do you see as the most significant recent breakthroughs in fusion science?With MAST, we are getting global views of the plasma inside the tokamak for the first time – enabling us to see the struc-ture of the plasma in greater detail than ever before. We are also seeing breakthroughs in detector systems to probe the parameters of the plasma, such as density and temperature, as well as mathematically modelling the plasma turbulence using computers. Plasmas are complex systems; they are not in thermal equilibrium, there is turbulence going on and they emit high levels of radiation, so it’s our job to tame all that. This enables us to both measure and calculate plasma proper-ties to look for possible discrepancies in our models. Plasma turbulence has been the problem so far, but these advances are helping us to reduce and manage this.

What do you now see as the key challenges for fusion research?Developing materials that can withstand the extreme condi-tions inside fusion power plants is one of the main areas we

Steven Cowley, new director of UKAEA Culham.

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6 F u s i o n C h a l l e n g e s a n d s o l u t i o n s o C t o b e r 2 0 0 8

need to focus on. For example, when tritium and deuterium fuse, they release a 14 MeV neutron and an alpha particle. In ITER, the alpha particle will contain enough energy to keep the plasma hot, but some of the heat that gets lost has to be taken away through a part of the tokamak called a divertor, which is basically the exhaust. Part of the problem is that the power coming from the divertor is almost 10 MW m–2, so we need to find materials that can spread the heat load and at the same time can survive being bombarded by neutrons.

What are the key issues facing Culham over the next 10 years?As well as performing experiments on JET, which will be used as input for ITER, we are also upgrading MAST. The spherical tokamak is a very tempting route for a materials test reactor. The upgrade of MAST will look at how we can scale up to such a facility.

We also need to place the UK right at the centre of the fusion economy. For example, to make a tokamak reac-tor, there is the question of how to breed tritium using the 14 MeV neutron and utilize the heat that it generates. ITER will employ test blankets to capture the neutrons and then extract heat. When commercial reactors start to be built, the key intellectual property will lie in the blanket. We need to get involved in the nuclear engineering of these blankets, as well as other components. That means securing more fund-ing to keep JET running until ITER comes online in 2018 and keeping MAST at the forefront of spherical-tokamak

research. We also have to bring more bright young people into fusion because there are lots of interesting problems that need to be solved.

Do you believe that fusion, like fission, has an image problem?Yes, because people still say that fusion is 30 years away. JET’s first plasma injection was 25 years ago now, but it takes a long time to develop these machines fully. If we could have developed fusion more quickly, we would have done it. We can’t just produce it in a flash and it would be fool-ish to say that only low-cost technologies should be devel-oped. However, we could have built ITER by 1995 if we had received enough funding.

What lies beyond ITER?We are involved in one of the great quests of the last 50 years and when we start producing fusion power it will be with a great sense of achievement. I want us at Culham to carry out the first design of the demonstration reactor (DEMO) and I would love to host DEMO in the UK.Steven Cowley is director of UKAEA Culham.

We have to bring more bright young people into fusion because there are lots of interesting problems that need to be solved.

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F U S I O N C H A L L E N G E S A N D S O L U T I O N S O C T O B E R 2 0 0 8 9

The rocky road to ITERITER is a €5bn experimental reactor that aims to demonstrate the scientifi c and technical feasibility of fusion by producing 500 MW of power in 1000 s pulses. The facility, being built at Cadarache in the south of France, is funded by China, the European Union (EU), India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the US. ITER has not faced an easy path, with member states leaving and rejoining, while redesigns and political indecision have frequently stalled the project.

1985

The European Union (EU), Japan, the then Soviet Union and US enter into a collaboration to build an experimental reactor that aims to demonstrate the scientifi c and technical practicality of fusion power.

1988 Conceptual design activity for ITER starts, with the aim of demonstrating the feasibility of controlled ignition in deuterium–tritium plasmas with steady-state burning. The design takes two years to complete.

1992

Engineering design activities for ITER begin, looking at the complete technical design specifi cations necessary to construct a 1.5 GW fusion reactor.

1998 The fi nal engineering design report is approved by the ITER council, which supervises the organization and budget of the project. However, ITER members demand that costs are cut by 50%, so the engineering design is revised.

1999 The US withdraws from the project over doubts that the design would work as planned, citing excessive construction costs.

2001 Canada gains ITER membership, while the design revision is completed for a 500 MW reactor at an estimated cost of €4.6bn.

2002 The EU proposes Cadarache, about 60 km from Marseille in France, and Vandellos, around 100 km from Barcelona in Spain, as candidate sites for ITER, while Japan proposes Rokkasho, on the northern tip of Honshu Island in central Japan, and Canada proposes Clarington on the north shore of Lake Ontario, some 60 km east of Toronto.

2003

The US rejoins ITER and it is followed by new members China and South Korea, while Canada withdraws its support due to a lack of federal funding. Cadarache in France is chosen as the favoured European site to hold ITER.

2005

Ministers from ITER’s six members pick Cadarache to host ITER, while Japan gets given the International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility designed to test suitable materials for use in a fusion reactor. Japan’s Kaname Ikeda becomes the fi rst director general of the project. Later in the year India becomes the seventh member of ITER.

2007 The US cancels funding for ITER in the 2008 fi nancial year.

2008 The project is delayed by two years until 2018 and a proposed update to the 2001 design could increase the cost further. The US reinstates $16m to the project in its “supplemental” spending bill for 2008.

ITER timeline

PWfusion08_p09.indd 9 23/9/08 11:40:52

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Dan Mistry outlines how industry can compete for valuable fusion contracts.

Industrial procurement in fusion

Realizing the potential of nuclear fusion as a large-scale energy source depends on engaging industry to build reac-tor facilities and to supply the specialist engineering skills that are needed to sustain, monitor and control the fusion reaction. To help in that endeavour, the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) has a dedicated fusion and industry team based at the Culham Science Centre in Oxfordshire. Its role is to encourage UK companies to bid for international supply contracts arising from fusion research, in particular ITER, the power-plant-scale fusion experiment currently under construction in Cadarache, France.

ITER is a significant business opportunity for UK engin­eering and high-technology companies, and is a high priority for our fusion and industry team. UK firms are already help-ing to provide the innovative engineering solutions required for the project, but more companies need to get involved. Construction of the facility offers a number of options for different sectors, ranging from civil, mechanical and electri-cal engineering, consultancy services and project manage-ment through to instrumentation, advanced materials and

precision engineering. Areas of particular relevance to ITER include the development and manufacture of high­heat­flux components, high-power electrical engineering, vacuum and pumping systems, remote handling, multi-megawatt particle beams and radio-frequency-wave heating systems, laser and optical diagnostics, a wide range of instrumentation, and computing, data acquisition and control systems.

Registered companies can receive alerts about fusion events.

PWfusion08_p11-12.indd 11 19/9/08 09:57:01

12 F u s i o n C h a l l e n g e s a n d s o l u t i o n s o C t o b e r 2 0 0 8

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The fusion and industry team has good contacts with Fusion for Energy (F4E), the domestic agency based in Barcelona, Spain, that manages the European procurements for ITER. Some 90% of all ITER procurement will be handled by the domestic agencies of the seven ITER partners, with Europe being responsible for more than one-third of all the contracts. Most of the ITER contracts that are open to UK companies will, therefore, be placed via F4E. Some initial procurement has taken place, but most contracts will be offered over the next 10 years and will amount to at least €2bn.

Procurement by F4E will be partly database driven. Companies can register on the F4E procurement database to receive requests for expressions of interest (http://eidi.f4e.europa.eu). Currently there are more than 200 UK compa-nies registered, but there are many more firms in the country with the suitable expertise. My message to UK industry is to look seriously at these opportunities, which range from conventional to leading-edge engineering, and also include consultancy and project management.

I see subcontracting as presenting perhaps the best option for many UK firms. This is largely because F4E is expected to break Europe’s contribution to ITER into relatively large contracts (perhaps ranging from two to many tens of mil-lions of Euros) for the supply of components and systems, plus smaller service contracts for engineering design/support during the project’s construction phase. Companies intend-ing to bid as main contractors are unlikely to have the com-plete range of skills required in-house, and so will be seeking

subcontractors. Early consortia opportunities involving UK firms are currently being actively pursued.

The team at Culham also arranges occasional trade missions for UK companies to visit F4E headquarters and the ITER site. A visit to F4E will typically include meetings with the procurement teams, engineers and possibly senior manage-ment, while visits to ITER normally allow companies to meet the engineers working on the project, as well as local French companies, with a view to possibly forming consortia.

Opportunities also exist for industry involvement in fusion research that is taking place in the UK. The Culham Science Centre is home to the UK’s fusion programmes and what is currently the world’s largest fusion experiment – the Joint European Torus. To hear details about fusion contracts from the various UK-based programmes, and also ITER, compa-nies should register with the Culham team’s database (www.fusion-industry.org.uk). Registered companies receive alerts about tendering opportunities, fusion news, plus details of technology-related events, workshops and exhibitions.

Fusion research and ITER in particular offer great opportu-nities for UK companies to win new business, either as a single supplier or as part of a consortium of firms. The first step is to register with both the F4E and the Culham fusion and industry databases, and then to let the fusion and industry team help you become part of this multibillion Euro sector.Dan Mistry is head of the UKAEA’s fusion and industry team and is a champion for UK industry involvement in the ITER project (www.fusion-industry.org).

PWfusion08_p11-12.indd 12 19/9/08 09:57:32

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Untitled-10 1 23/9/08 10:11:26

14 F u s i o n C h a l l e n g e s a n d s o l u t i o n s o C t o b e r 2 0 0 8

Jan Mlynár and Radomír Pánek describe how researchers have installed a tokamak formerly based in the UK in the Czech Republic, putting the country at the forefront of European fusion research.

Tracking ITER with COMPASS

When the Czech Republic joined the European Union (EU) on 1 May 2004 with 10 other states, the country had a unique position in fusion research – it was the only new member with an operating tokamak. However, the Czech Academy of Sciences Torus (CASTOR), which dates back to the 1960s, was also the oldest operating tokamak in the world. CASTOR underwent several upgrades, such as the installation of a new vacuum vessel in the 1980s, but it lacked several critical components, such as a divertor – a key part of a tokamak that acts as an exhaust – which meant that the machine was simply incapable of carrying out research relevant to the ITER facility being built in France.

However, just as the Czech Republic was joining the EU, a tokamak named the Compact Assembly (COMPASS), at the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) Fusion Association, belonging to the Culham Science Centre, was being decom-missioned to pave the way for an even more ambitious project – the Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak. In the 10 years that COMPASS operated at Culham it provided extremely valuable data and was still doing cutting-edge fusion sci-ence until the decision was made in 2001 to decommission it. COMPASS also contained a D-shaped vacuum chamber with a divertor, which meant that experiments performed on it could be scaled up to mimic plasmas characteristic of those planned for ITER.

The UKAEA offered to reinstall COMPASS in Prague at the Institute of Plasma Physics (IPP), part of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic – an offer that the IPP accepted. “The offer came as a miracle because we were fac-ing a crucial decision about how to maintain cutting-edge fusion research at the IPP without an adequate facility,” says Pavel Chráska, IPP’s director. But the offer to donate COMPASS was not enough. “We also had to gain support from the leaders of the national academy, extra financial sup-port from the government and find enough experienced peo-ple for the task,” adds Chráska.

The IPP did eventually get backing for the project from the Czech government, as well as priority support from the European Atomic Energy Community (EURATOM), with which the Czech Republic has been associated since 1999. However, COMPASS still had to be taken apart, transported and then reinstalled on the other side of the continent, which was quite a challenge. The IPP team even travelled to the UK

to dismantle COMPASS with assistance from engineers at Culham. COMPASS arrived in Prague on 20 October2007 and a new building to house it was erected at the end of last year.

To operate the tokamak required 50 MW of electric power in 2 s pulses. Unlike at Culham, this power level was not available from the national grid at the IPP, so different options of power generation had to be discussed. A bid-ding process was implemented, which was won by the Czech company CKD, and in early 2008 two 35 MW flywheel generators were installed next to the new building.

Another change involved heating the plasma, not with microwaves but instead

by injecting a beam of fast atoms into the plasma, which allowed an ion temperature of up to 3 keV to be achieved, compared with just few hundred electron-volts in the old set-up. In other words, with the new system, the plasma cen-tre is now expected to reach around 30 × 106 K. Proposals are about to be invited to supply two neutral-beam injectors and the challenge remains to build all the major diagnostic sys-tems. Altogether, the new systems and infrastructure will cost around €14m, with most of the money coming from the Czech government and some being provided by EURATOM.

COMPASS is hoping to generate its first plasma by December this year and, once operational, it will aspire to become a leading centre among the new EU countries for cutting-edge fusion science. It also seeks to be a place to train new fusion scientists, who may later contribute both to research at home and at ITER. “We are going to focus on the physics of the plasma edge by using advanced diagnostics methods, as well as trying to mitigate the plasma instabilities occurring in this region,” says Jan Stöckel, head of the IPP tokamak depart-ment. “Both these topics are highly relevant to ITER.”

Interest in COMPASS has also spread to the wider academic community. In 2006 the Faculty of Nuclear Engineering and Physical Sciences at the Czech Technical University in Prague introduced a new nuclear-fusion module into its BSc and MSc programmes, and the university also intends to refurbish CASTOR for practical exercises with students. “We strongly believe that this scientific programme will stimulate our collaboration within Europe and attract a new generation of Czech physicists to fusion research,” says Stöckel.Jan Mlynár and Radomír Pánek work at the Institute of Plasma Physics in the Czech Republic.

COMPASS had to make way for MAST but found a new home in the Czech Republic.

PWfusion08_p14.indd 14 19/9/08 10:11:11

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Fusion challenges and solutionsIOP Publishing engages in many activitiesinvolving fusion technology, includingspecial features, supplements, targetede-mail alerts and two of the world’sleading fusion research journals.

Keep up to date with the latest researchand developments in fusion technologyby registering your email address with us.

E-mail us at nuclearfusion@iop.org.

Photograph courtesy of Aaron Gage at EFDA-JE

PWFSOct08_p15.indd 1 24/9/08 10:04:58

16 F u s i o n C h a l l e n g e s a n d s o l u t i o n s o C t o b e r 2 0 0 8

ITER attracts all kinds of physicists

There appears to be a common misunderstanding in the media, and occasionally among physicists, that fusion is hard to achieve. This is not the case – in fact it can be achieved rou-tinely using small, portable particle accelerators that smash deuterium ions into a tritium target, and such devices are used in the oil industry as neutron sources for bore-hole logging. It is also not difficult to get power out of fusion reactions – that is done in nuclear bombs. The technical challenge facing the physicists and engineers working on the ITER project is to produce a sustained, controlled fusion reaction in a manner that is suitable for the generation of electrical power.

ITER will be the world’s largest fusion experiment. Within a vacuum chamber that will be nearly 20 m across, a mixture of deuterium and tritium gases will be heated to temperatures of more than 200 × 106 K – hotter than the core of the Sun. Meanwhile, just metres away, superconducting coils will be held at temperatures close to absolute zero. These coils will create the magnetic field that will constrain the plasma for up to 400 s, which is long enough to allow a fusion burn produc-ing up to 500 MW. How to protect the superconducting coils from the tremendous heat of the plasma is just one of the many complex challenges facing those building ITER.

Since June 2005, when it was decided that ITER would be sited at Cadarache in the south of France, a growing team of scientists, engineering and support staff has been gathering (more than 300 by summer 2008) and the civil-engineering works have begun. The site has been cleared and the infra-structure should be in place by early 2009. The first set of temporary offices will be ready for use this month, allowing the ITER team to begin moving onto the site from offices provided by France’s atomic energy commission (CEA) in Cadarache. Most of the design work for the experiment itself was carried out during the previous decade and the task now is to bring those designs to fruition, with the aim of produc-ing the first plasma with the next 10 years or so.

All about neutronsI joined ITER in September 2007 as a nuclear physicist, having worked in fusion for the whole of my career. I began in 1984 as a PhD student developing spectrometers for the measurement of neutrons produced in the Joint European Torus (JET), the fusion experiment at Culham in Oxfordshire, UK, and was then employed there making neutron measurements. Fusion, either using pure deuterium or deuterium–tritium plasmas, produces neutrons of a characteristic energy and, by measur-ing the energy of the neutrons, we can learn much about the processes in the plasma that lead to their production.

After developing and exploiting the neutron spectrom-eters, my career broadened into new areas of experimental measurement. This included investigating the total neutron production from JET using the neutron-activation technique.

As would be expected, the use of other methods requires learning new analytical techniques and therefore I began carrying out radiation-transport calculations. This eventu-ally became my principal activity and I performed radiation-transport analyses for devices such as JET and the Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak at Culham, and the National Spherical Torus Experiment at Princeton in the US. I also worked on proposed devices, such as the International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility, which will now be built in Japan.

My role at ITER is to analyse the neutron- and gamma- radiation transport throughout the facility and to coordinate the efforts of the scientists around the world who provide further support, expertise and analysis. The radiation analy-sis involves calculating how radiation behaves in computer models of ITER and its components, using Monte Carlo or semi-analytical techniques. This requires some of the most powerful computers in the world.

There are many facets to the radiation analysis of a large fusion device and one of the most important involves monitor-ing the neutrons produced by the plasma. Most reports in the media about fusion over the past 20 years have focused on the measurements of the neutrons, either when none were seen, as in the case of cold fusion, or when records for fusion were bro-ken and the measurement of the number of neutrons produced was used as a direct measure of the power level.

Nuclear heating of the superconducting magnets, which is caused by neutrons colliding and giving up their kinetic energy, is a particular concern. Excessive heating of the

Fusion is an exciting field to work in, says Mike Loughlin, and, as the construction of ITER gathers steam, there will be plenty of job opportunities for physicists.

Mike Loughlin has been involved with fusion all his working life and is now part of the team at ITER in Cadrache, France.

PWfusion08_p16-17.indd 16 19/9/08 10:33:48

F u s i o n C h a l l e n g e s a n d s o l u t i o n s o C t o b e r 2 0 0 8 17

coils would lead to a temperature rise, loss of superconduc-tivity and hence loss of the magnetic field, meaning that the plasma would be extinguished. To prevent this happening, sufficient cooling to the vessel and nuclear shielding for the coils must be provided.

The neutrons can also damage materials close to the plasma. They can cause short-term activation of the steels (via nuclear reactions with the iron and cobalt they contain), which then act as a secondary source of gamma radiation. Neutrons can also produce helium atoms deep within the structure, which can be problematic if any further weld-ing needs to be done on it. Understanding and monitoring the behaviour of neutrons in a fusion device will become increasingly important as we near our goal.

All of this has implications for shielding design, cooling, maintenance, remote handling, safety and so on, so nuclear analysts must interact with many other members of the proj-ect team and we therefore need to be familiar with the prin-ciples of how all these systems work. But we also need to understand how the systems interact, since integrating them is a constant challenge.

Teaming upFusion experiments are characterized by large teams. This is because a device like ITER is extremely complex, requiring the skills of plasma physicists, experts in magnet, vacuum and cryogenic technologies, radio-frequency (RF) physi-cists, accelerator scientists, and many more. To coordinate

ITER’s international team of scientists, regular meetings – either by video conferencing or face-to-face meetings at Cadarache and the home laboratories of the collaborating scientists – are held to report on progress and to share com-mon problems and solutions.

This is one of the greatest pleasures of the job. The calibre of the scientists I have worked with has always been very high, the intellectual challenge is constantly surprising and stimulating, and I am frequently aware of the historic nature of what we are trying to achieve. I have been lucky enough to have been part of all of the world’s largest fusion experiments and to have been responsible for measuring the fusion power when new world records were set. This is a great position to be in because you become the bearer of goods news to mem-bers of the large team whose efforts led to the achievement.

Over the next few years the ITER teams will grow. The composition of the teams will evolve as we move from construction to commissioning and then to the operational phase. There will be an increasing need for physicists with backgrounds in nuclear physics, plasma physics, RF or vac-uum technologies, magnet and accelerator physics, and so on. The timescale of ITER and the development of fusion energy means that the today’s students and graduates will be needed to build on the triumphs of today’s and tomorrow’s fusion devices and to develop nuclear fusion as a clean and safe source of energy.Mike Loughlin is a nuclear physicist working on the ITER project based in Cadarache, France.

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Research into fusion energy using facilities such as JET, MAST and the Central Laser Facility in the UK, and fusion devices of the future, like ITER and the proposed HiPER, has created a demand for fusion scientists and engineers.Our new MSc provides a foundation for those who want to pursue a career in fusion research or broaden their generic skills. You will be taught by experts of international repute over one-year full-time or two-years part time. The course includes:

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ITER will be the world’s largest experimental fusion facility and is designed to demonstrate the scientifi c and technological feasibility of fusion power. The ITER project is sited at Cadarache in the South of France. As an international organization, ITER offers challenging assignments in a stimulating multi-cultural workplace.

There are several positions currently open to applicants from the ITER Parties (European Union (including Switzerland), Japan, the People’s Republic of China, India, the Republic of Korea, the Russian Federation and the USA):

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Please apply through ITER Domestic Agency corresponding to your nationality.For further questions please send an email to: HR-recruitment@iter.org

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ITER will be the world’s largest experimental fusion facility and is designed to demonstrate the scientifi c and technological feasibility of fusion power. The ITER project is sited at Cadarache in the South of France. As an international organization, ITER offers challenging assignments in a stimulating multi-cultural workplace.

There are several positions currently open to applicants from the ITER Parties (European Union (including Switzerland), Japan, the People’s Republic of China, India, the Republic of Korea, the Russian Federation and the USA):

For job descriptions and the details of application procedure please go to:

http://www.iter.org/a/index_jobs.htm

Please apply through ITER Domestic Agency corresponding to your nationality.For further questions please send an email to: HR-recruitment@iter.org

Professional Staff (P-Category)

Technical Support Staff (G-Category)

CEP-025 Leader of the Coil Power Supply Section

CEP-077 Cryo Distribution Engineer

CEP-079 Design Confi guration Control Section Leader

CEP-083 Radioactive Waste Process Engineer

CEP-084 Senior Cooling Water Systems Engineer

CEP-086 Vacuum Design Engineer

CEP-087 Wall Conditioning System Engineer

CHD-049 Microwave Engineer

CHD-050 Neutral Beam Integration & Control Engineer

CHD-051 Interlock Systems Engineer

CHD-052 Database Engineer

CHD-053 Control System Engineer

CHD-054 Developer for Integration of Project Applications

CHD-055 Diagnostic Physicist

CHD-056 Diagnostic Engineer

CEP-089 Cryogenic Technical Engineer

FST-019 Technical Offi cer, TBM Programme Technology

FST-020 Computational Plasma Physicist: Plasma Surface Interactions

FST-021 Scientifi c Offi cer: Heating & Current Drive Physics

PRO-063 Senior Offi cer for Reliability, Availability, Maintainability & Inspectability (RAMI)

PRO-067 Senior Offi cer for Systems Engineering Processes

SAS-014 Lead Quality Assurance Engineer

SAS-015 Magnet Quality Assurance Engineer

TKM-014 High Voltage Magnet Engineer

TKM-070 Coil Designer

TKM-075 Vacuum Vessel Manufacturing Engineer

TKM-076 Design Engineer / Physicist

TKM-078 Engineer for Divertor Procurement

TKM-080 Plant Systems Installation Engineer

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ITER (Fusion) advert.indd 1 16/9/08 13:36:49p18-19.indd 19 22/9/08 15:28:03

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