The International Linear Collider (ILC) is proposed as an energy frontier electron-positron colliding accelerator, started with a center-of-mass beam collision energy of 250 GeV, as “Higgs factory”. The ILC accelerator design and the preparation for construction are discussed. The core technologies of Radio Frequency superconductivity and production and manipulation of extremely low emittance beams (nano-beam) are presented. The plan for the energy-staging at the center-of-mass energy starting with 250 GeV and future prospects are discussed. The ILC will allow the properties of the Higgs boson to be measured with unprecedented precision, and will provide possible discovery of new particles beyond the standard model with the energy extendability as a natural feature of the linear accelerator.

ILC (International Linear Collider) is an electron positron collider which is promoted by an international collaboration and is planned to build in Japan. In this article, social significance of an international scientific project in a large scale is discussed. We found that the scientific project produces new knowledge and human resource which are indispensable to maintain the social development. As political functions, it contributes to stabilize the international relation among nations which is one of the most important and urgent issue in the modern world.

The ILC is the first energy frontier collider project that was envisioned jointly by the world high energy physics community to be a truly global project, unlike its predecessors hosted by some existing laboratory. The machine is envisaged to be constructed mustering human and material resources from over the world. As such, the ILC project is expected to face new organizational challenges. In this article, possible approaches to workable project implementation are reviewed.

We discuss social impacts of large scientific projects such as the International Linear Collider (ILC). Since the subject covers a wide range of issues and it is difficult to cover all of them, we discuss a part economic and cultural aspect in this article. Even through the ILC have not gotten “go” signal from funding agencies, it already has years of history in collaborative works in academia, industry and public. The impacts are not the issues in the future, but are on-going issues to be discussed. It is also to be kept in mind that the impacts are not one way issues from the projects to the societies and mutual communications are a key to successful realization of the project.

The design of International Linear Collider (ILC) is based on the Superconducting RF (SRF) technology, which is more efficient than the normal conducting technology in terms of the energy consumption. However, still the total energy consumption of ILC (500 GeV) is 164 MW, which is much larger than those of existing accelerators in the world. In such a situation, the reduction of energy consumption in ILC, thus the efficient and sustainable design of ILC, is the crucial issue to realize it in the near future in a Japanese site. In order to challenge the issue, we organized a working group, so called “Green-ILC WG” in the Advanced Accelerator Association (AAA) in Japan, which involves 112 companies from industry and 42 organizations from academia. The Green-ILC WG is also collaborating with the international team of ILC. The activities are covering the studies on the efficient design of components, accelerator sub-systems, ILC-system, and even ILC-city. This presentation will report the current status of these studies.

The ITER project ^{1, 2)} was established in November 2006 by the ITER Agreement involving seven Members (China, the European Union including Switzerland, India, Japan, Korea, the Russian Federation and the United States of America). ITER is a critical step in the development of fusion energy: its role is to confirm the feasibility of exploiting magnetic confinement fusion for the production of energy for peaceful purposes by providing an integrated demonstration of the physics and technology required for a fusion power plant. At the core of the facility, the ITER tokamak will confine a plasma heated to temperatures in the region of 1–2×10⁸ K, in which deuterium-tritium fusion reactions will produce up to 500 MW of fusion power for periods ranging from several hundred to several thousand seconds. Extensive progress has been made in the on-site construction, the production of components for the ITER tokamak, plant and auxiliary systems, and in the preparations for on-site installation. Recently, a major update of the ITER baseline schedule and resource estimate has been undertaken. The revised schedule foresees an earliest technically achievable date for First Plasma of December 2025 and a target date for the transition to D/DT operation of late 2035. This report outlines the ITER project management and recent progress of tokamak components manufacturing and on-site construction activities of the ITER facility.

ILC will be a unique facility when once it has come. While the main purpose of ILC is concentrated on the high-energy physics for the time being, it should be very useful to consider diversified usages of the facility among the wide science fields. In order to reveal variety of ideas towards the diversified applications, a workshop “ILC diversified application” was held on 29-30^th, November 2017 at 2 go-kan, KEK.

The Joint US-CERN-Japan-Russia Accelerator School 2017 was held at the Hayama Shonan Village Center from October 16 to 26, 2017. The school welcomed 55 students and 22 lectures from many countries of Asia, Russia, Europe and North America, and was completed successfully.