Bernard Bigot, the director general of ITER, the enormous international fusion experiment under construction in southern France, died on 14 May at age 72.
A chemist by training, the soft-spoken Frenchman took over as head of the ITER organization in 2015, when the project was facing massive criticism for cost increases and delays. He transformed it from an agglomeration of competing national industrial interests into a much more coherent scientific project, observers say.
ITER aims to help harness nuclear fusion, the process that powers the Sun, as a terrestrial source of power. A doughnut-shaped machine known as a tokamak, ITER will use magnetic fields to trap a super-hot plasma of deuterium and tritium—heavier isotopes of hydrogen—so their nuclei can fuse to produce helium and release energy. ITER’s specific goal is to prove that a tokamak can produce 10 times more energy than is needed to generate the plasma.
A decade ago, such cost increases threatened ITER’s survival. In the U.S. Senate, members of the powerful appropriations committee repeatedly tried to kill the U.S. ITER program. After a scathing management review,. Then the chairman and CEO of the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, Bigot had already played an instrumental role in bringing the project to France, says Cowley, who led the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority from 2009 to 2015.
The first stage of the project is now more than 75% complete, and on 10 May, ITER announced that workers had fitted the first section of the massive toroidal vacuum chamber into place. Bigot “managed to turn around what was a pretty poor work culture and turn it into something where people began to have real pride,” Cowley says. Still, the project faces challenges.
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