Les apprentis de BTS Electrotechnique ont visité le site de Cadarache, accompagnés de leurs... formatrices d'anglais. Ils nous racontent leur journée... dans la langue de Shakespeare!

 On March the second 2017, we went to the site of ITER in Cadarache.

ITER is the biggest Tokamak magnetic confinement fusion experiment.

We left CFAI by bus at half past twelve for a path of 1h30.

Once on place, first we passed the security guard, and we went to a point of view to look at all the construction site. After that, Mrs. Hamilton welcomed us and invited us to join the conference room for a presentation of ITER with a slideshow.

To summarize a little the project, ITER is an international project uniting different countries:  Europe, India, Japan, Russia, China, South Korea and United States of America. Everything begins in 2006 with signature of a special agreement.

The location in Saint Paul Lez Durance was chosen because of its size (free area of 180 ha) close to the CEA site of Cadarache.

The goal of this project is to search for a new way of producing electricity. Tokamak of ITER will be able to supply 500 MW of fusion power from 50 MW of heating power. The fusion is the reaction of Deuterium and Tritium, they are in the form of gaz heated in high temperature to produce plasma, the fourth state of matter. In this case, we create vaccum to drive the turbine to produce electricity.

In the second time, we visited the construction site in bus, not all the buildings are finishes yet.

An important particularity is that it is an international, not French site, the rules and laws here are all international and specific. For example French firemen can’t intervene here, so there is a special unit of ITER’s firemen. It is multinational and multilingual site, but the common language is English.

Everything is this site is just enormous and it was a wonderful occasion to visit such a unique project in the world.

This visit was very interesting and benefic for all of us and we hope also to have good marks for the test that we had to do during the visit.

We would like to thank Mrs. Hamilton (our guide), Mrs. Odintcova and  Mrs. Estevenin  (our English teachers) and our school CFAI84 for organization of our visit.

Class of BTS Electrical engineering, 1^st year

March 15^th, 2017 

Written by students

Rémy Leveque, Benjamin Lecomte,

Tanguy Fargier and Arnaud Charbonnier