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ITER's new chief will shake-up troubled fusion reactor
http://www.nature.com/news/iter-s-new-chief-will-shake-up-troubled-fusion-reactor-1.16396[font face=Serif][font size=5]ITER's new chief will shake-up troubled fusion reactor[/font]
[font size=4]Bernard Bigot, the next director general of ITER, will reform the decentralized structure of the project.[/font]
21 November 2014
[font size=3]A multibillion-euro project to build the world's largest nuclear fusion reactor will soon have a new chief. Bernard Bigot, who was nominated to be director general of ITER on 20 November, says he intends to radically reform the management and governance of the troubled project.
Bigot is currently chairman of the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, (CEA), and will succeed Japan's Osamu Motojima, who has been director general since July 2010. The current organization of the project has been harshly criticized, and blamed for overruns in the costs of the reactor, and slips in its construction schedule.
Fusion reactors generate energy using the same underlying process as the Sun, by fusing hydrogen nuclei to make helium. A collaboration between the European Union, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the United States, ITER is designed to show the feasibility of nuclear fusion as a power source on Earth.
The device, which is under construction at a site in St Paul-lez-Durance in southern France, will consist of a doughnut-shaped reactor called a tokamak. The current official cost is at least €13 billion, compared with an initial price tag of €5 billion, but even this later figure is likely an underestimate.
…[/font][/font]
[font size=4]Bernard Bigot, the next director general of ITER, will reform the decentralized structure of the project.[/font]
21 November 2014
[font size=3]A multibillion-euro project to build the world's largest nuclear fusion reactor will soon have a new chief. Bernard Bigot, who was nominated to be director general of ITER on 20 November, says he intends to radically reform the management and governance of the troubled project.
Bigot is currently chairman of the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, (CEA), and will succeed Japan's Osamu Motojima, who has been director general since July 2010. The current organization of the project has been harshly criticized, and blamed for overruns in the costs of the reactor, and slips in its construction schedule.
Fusion reactors generate energy using the same underlying process as the Sun, by fusing hydrogen nuclei to make helium. A collaboration between the European Union, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the United States, ITER is designed to show the feasibility of nuclear fusion as a power source on Earth.
The device, which is under construction at a site in St Paul-lez-Durance in southern France, will consist of a doughnut-shaped reactor called a tokamak. The current official cost is at least €13 billion, compared with an initial price tag of €5 billion, but even this later figure is likely an underestimate.
…[/font][/font]
