Machinefabriek Boessenkool participated in the ITER Business Forum 2019

From 26 to 28 March, Machinefabriek Boessenkool was present at the ITER Business Forum (IBF) in Antibes Juan-les-Pins in the south of France. The penultimate edition of this forum took place in 2017.

The IBF offered (and offers every edition again) a unique opportunity to publicize our work, to draw attention to our innovations for the environment, people and society and to network internationally.

Purpose of the ITER Business Forum
One goal of the IBF is to support and simplify partnerships between industries within and outside Europe. The vision is that establishing, strengthening and maintaining contacts with potential partners at an international level should be a lot easier to do. The IBF also wants to promote collaboration between industries and laboratories. There is a lot of enthusiasm for these goals alone: the average edition of the forum attracts over a thousand participants from more than 400 companies from 25 countries. About 85 percent of those companies are European, about 15 percent come from outside the European Union.

During the three-day forum there is a lot to do and experience. The proverbial “something for everyone” absolutely applies here. Because: the IBF contains various meetings, an extensive exhibition, several technical tours and a conference filled with various thematic workshops and about a hundred speakers. It is fantastic to be present and actively participate in this with Machinefabriek Boessenkool.

What is ITER anyway?
The abbreviation ITER stands for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. At the same time, Iter is Latin for “the journey”. Very appropriate, because this is an international collaborative project that aims to demonstrate the scientific and technical feasibility of nuclear fusion as an energy source. An enormous process; an interesting journey that the partners in the project have embarked on together. These partners are: the European Union, Japan, South Korea, China, India, the United States and the Russian Federation.

A piece of history
A leap back in time to 1985. In that year, at the suggestion of Gorbachev, ITER cooperation began with Reagan at the Geneva Summit. The Soviet Union, the United States, Japan and the European Union formed a partnership. The United States withdrew in 1999, to reappear in 2003 and rejoin the ITER project. That same year, China and South Korea also got on board and two years later India became a member. Canada was a member until 2004, but dropped out when their location ceased to exist.

ITER, but where?
With the creation of the partnership, a location had to be determined for the implementation of the ITER project. Four countries offered a place for the ITER office: France, Spain, Canada and Japan. After a selection process, two locations remained: Cadarache in France and Rokkasho-mura in Japan. But Europe and Japan could not come to an agreement. And both locations had equal support among the then six participating countries. In June 2005 it was decided to build the reactor in Cadarache, near a French nuclear research center. Not “fair” for the Japanese, so they were allowed (and allowed) to provide a larger proportion of the employees within the project.

Construction started in August 2010, on a 42-hectare site prepared in advance. The number of construction workers has kept increasing over the years. There will now be about 5,000 and if the suspicions are correct, the work is at a peak this year.

Design and cost
Not long after the partners joined forces, a first design of the ITER machine was on the table. This provided 1.5 gigawatts of thermal fusion power, comparable to that of a commercial power plant. However, the pre-calculated financial picture did not lie. This prompted the ITER partners to quickly come up with a request for a substantial reduction in costs. Result: the ITER design was scaled down to a 500 megawatt (MW) machine. The final design was approved in 2001. With the total construction cost estimated at five billion euros.

For those interested in the technical specification: ITER will thus become a tokamak machine with a fusion power of 500 MW thermal and an input power of 50 MW, so that the energy multiplication is Q = 10. The length of time (confinement time) of the plasma is 500 seconds. This can be extended to about 3000 seconds with more advanced techniques. ITER is approximately 24 meters high and has a diameter of 34 meters. The plasma volume is 850 m3. The radius of the torus is about six meters and the plasma chamber is about eight meters high.

ITER: project for everyone
Altogether, ITER members represent three continents, more than 40 languages, half of the world’s population and 85 percent of the world’s gross domestic product. On the construction site, in the offices of the central team of the ITER organization, in the agencies, in laboratories and in industry, many thousands of people work towards the success of ITER. And: if the scientific and technical feasibility of nuclear fusion as an energy source is demonstrated, it will eventually have an effect on us all.