This shot was snapped from the roof of the five-storey ITER Headquarters on a bright June afternoon: in the foreground, formwork operations are 90 % done in the Tokamak Pit. Once completed, the Tokamak Complex will rise 60 metres, as high as the highest of the cranes on this picture.
Work has begun on the temporary Cryostat Workshop, situated near the Poloidal Field Coils building. The four sections of the cryostat will be assembled from 54 segments manufactured in India and delivered to the ITER site beginning 2014.
The workers on the completed basemat of the Assembly Building give us a sense of the scale of the future facility. In three places on the basemat, the concrete has been left unfinished in order to finalize the anchor plates of the specialized tools that will handle the unique ITER components.
The weather has finally improved in Provence and that's a good thing for the pace of work on the platform. Before summer time, the European Domestic Agency for ITER intends to sign for over EUR 500 million in contracts for items such as Tokamak Building cranes, mechanical and electrical installations, and the design and construction of the magnet power conversion and reactive power control buildings and the cold basin and cooling towers.
In the 90 x 130 metre Seismic Pit, the three stages of preparatory works for the next-level basemat are visible: propping and yellow formwork in the upper left corner of the image, plywood in the centre, and the first symmetrical lines of rebar in the foreground.
Between the Tokamak Building (left) and the Assembly Building (right) the wide gap will permit the installation of critical networks such as electricity, piping and cooling.
Soon, they will have disappeared from view: formwork will completely cover the seismic pillars and pads by early July. Whereas the laying of rebar will continue through September, the first concrete will be poured in a completed corner in August.
In the linear areas of the Tokamak Pit the positioning of rebar is, shall we say ... straightforward. In the radial area under the future Tokamak, however, it's a more complicated affair. On site currently, tests are underway on a 1:1-scale mockup to practice the complicated interfacing of the different rebar arrangements.
One-and-a-half metres of rebar, 4,000 tons in all, will be set precisely into place in the Tokamak Pit from now until mid-September for the B2 slab—the veritable "floor" of the Tokamak Complex.
The temporary Cryostat will be no small structure: the assembled cryostat sections, measuring 30 metres in diameter, will be constructed directly on their transport platforms and moved by rail out of the facility and a few hundred metres to the Assembly Building. The first manufactured segments for the cryostat will begin arriving late 2014, early 2015.
