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Building ITER

Building ITER

% completion to First Plasma

Describes percent of total work scope (design, component manufacturing, building construction, shipping and delivery, assembly, and installation) achieved.
78.1%

Construction

Construction of the ITER scientific installation began in 2010. At the heart of the facility, the Tokamak Complex is rising. (Photo: © ITER Organization, April 2022) (Click to view larger version...)
Construction of the ITER scientific installation began in 2010. At the heart of the facility, the Tokamak Complex is rising. (Photo: © ITER Organization, April 2022)
The ITER Project is currently under construction on a 180-hectare site in southern France.
 
Thirty-nine buildings and technical areas house the ITER Tokamak and its plant systems. The heart of the facility—the Tokamak Building—is a seven-storey structure in reinforced concrete that sits 13 metres below the platform level and 60 metres above. Pre-assembly of Tokamak components takes place in the adjacent Assembly Hall. Other auxiliary buildings in the vicinity of the Tokamak Building include cooling towers, electrical installations, a control room, facilities for the management of waste, and the cryogenics plant that will provide liquid helium to cool the ITER magnets.
 
Europe, as part of its commitments to the project, is building nearly all of the platform buildings and site infrastructure.
 
Each building, once structurally complete, is handed over to the ITER Organization for the installation and assembly of equipment. An estimated 2,000 workers have participated in the construction of the ITER scientific facility; another 2,000 are now involved in assembly and installation (including oversight). 
 
The successful integration and assembly of over one million components (ten million parts) built in the ITER Members' factories around the world and delivered to the ITER site constitutes a tremendous logistics and engineering challenge. 
 
In the ITER offices around the world, the exact sequence of assembly events has been carefully orchestrated and coordinated. In November 2017, the ITER Project passed the 50 percent milestone of work scope completed to First Plasma. (See related article here.) The current percent of completion can be consulted at the top of this page. 
 
ITER machine assembly has begun. For more information (and images) about machine and plant assembly, please see these pages.
 
Main construction milestones:
 
2006              Signature of the ITER Agreement
2007-2009     Land clearing and levelling
2010-2014     Ground support structure and seismic foundations for the Tokamak
2014-2021     Construction of the Tokamak Building (access for first assembly activities in 2018)
2010-2021     Construction of the ITER plant and auxiliary buildings for First Plasma
2020-2025     Main assembly phase 1
Dec 2025       First Plasma (2016 Baseline schedule, update underway)
 
Take a virtual tour of ITER construction here.