Organisation

The ITER project brings together the most advanced nations in the world to co-operate in the development of a major potential new technology. The challenges of the ITER project require the best technological and scientific expertise, which can best be harnessed by pooling resources globally.

The ITER project will be undertaken by a new international organisation: the ITER International Organisation, which will have its headquarters in Cadarache, France. The ITER organisation will be responsible for all aspects of the project: the licensing procedure, hardware procurements mostly provided in kind by the Parties, the twenty-year operation period, and ultimately for decommissioning of ITER at the end of its lifetime.

This organisation will be established by the ITER agreement, which will be ratified by the governments of the participating partners. The current partners are the European Union, Japan, the Russian Federation, China, India, South Korea and the USA. Once the ITER Agreement is finalised, other countries that want to contribute to the project (and who have demonstrated a capacity for specific technologies and knowledge) can become a partner, or can cooperate with other partners.

The members of the Organisation will bear the costs of ITER. The construction costs of ITER are estimated at 4.57 billion Euro (at 2000 prices), to be spread over about ten years. A similar amount is foreseen for the twenty-year operation lifetime of ITER, which will follow the construction period. The EU will contribute almost half of the costs of ITER, the other partners will share the remaining part. During the construction of the ITER device, most of the components will be contributed by the members in kind, meaning that they will contribute the components themselves, rather than paying for them.

Construction of the ITER complex is planned to begin in 20008, while assembly of the tokamak itself is scheduled to begin in the year 2011. The first plasma is expected to be produced in 2016.

Management of the ITER International Organisation

In the first months of 2006, the top management team of ITER has been named. The Director-General of the project will be Kaname Ikeda, formerly Ambassador for Japan in Croatia. The Project Construction Leader will be Dr. Norbert Holtkamp, born German, and former director of accelerator systems at the Spallation Neutron Source in Oak Ridge, USA.
More information can be found here.

The Cadarache site

Figure 1:Figure 1:Impression of the ITER site (top).
Below, the existing site of CEA is shown, which
houses the Tore Supra fusion experiment.

ITER will be constructed in Cadarache, in the South of France. This was unanimously decided in June 2005 by the ITER partners during a meeting Moscow. The site was supported for a number of reasons, the first one being, of course, that the site satisfies all the technical requirements specified by the international team in charge of the design of ITER.

Secondly, Cadarache already hosts the world´s largest super-conducting fusion experiment Tore-Supra at the CEA Cadarache Research Centre, one of the biggest civil nuclear research centres in Europe. Therefore the Cadarache site has existing technical support facilities and expertise.

A third advantage is that France has well-established regulations for licensing ground-breaking "first of a kind" facilities such as ITER.

Figure 2:Cadarache and Europe

Cadarache is situated close to Marseille, the second largest city in France, which has an excellent social, cultural, industrial and academic infrastructure, an agreeable climate and a pleasant natural environment. These will help attract the brightest and best scientists and engineers from around the world to the ITER project.

More information on the Cadarache site can be found here.

The European Contribution: "Fusion for Energy"

In order to manage and provide their contribution to the ITER project, each of the partners needs to establish its own domestic agency, which is responsible for the delivery of the components to ITER. A European domestic agency is being established for this purpose. This new organisation will be called " Fusion for Energy" (the full name being the European Joint Undertaking for ITER and the Development of Fusion Energy), and will be located in Barcelona, Spain.

This new organisation will also provide Europe´s contribution to other international fusion research efforts, and, in the longer term, support a programme of research and development activities to prepare for the construction of prototype fusion reactors.