Keeping the project humming
At the sixth annual ITER Awards ceremony last week, six prizes were presented to teams and individuals in recognition of outstanding project execution in 2025. The ITER Director-General also took the opportunity to express appreciation to all project participants—and the families who support them—for their dedication in ensuring the on-time implementation of the project’s baseline.
At a China-themed gala on Thursday, 11 December, the ITER community celebrated its superstars—four teams nominated and elected by their peers to receive a 2025 award for exceptional performance.
In addition, ITER Director-General Pietro Barabaschi exercised his “Director’s prerogative” to name two recipients of the Director’s Choice Award, both recognized for their role in achieving a series of remarkable vacuum vessel assembly milestones in 2025.
The ITER vacuum vessel is now one-third installed in the tokamak pit and, if the project continues apace there will be six sectors in the pit one year from now. The specialists involved with these milestones—and the unified team they form—are “worthy of special recognition” according to the ITER Director-General.
“They have accomplished what I was told could not be accomplished—working to, and sometimes even ahead of, the schedule we established.”
The ITER Organization and the Domestic Agencies continue to make excellent progress in the implementation of Baseline 2024. From January 2024 through September 2025, the ITER construction project has achieved schedule performance and cost performance indices of greater than 1.0—meaning that ITER is somewhat ahead of schedule while spending less than anticipated in the baseline.
The evening’s special guests—HE Youlin, Chinese Consul-General in Marseille, and GUO Xiaolan, Minister-Counsellor for Science and Technology at the Chinese Embassy of Paris—celebrated the international nature of ITER and the global efforts toward fusion energy.
2025 award results
The Component Delivery Team Award went to the magnet cold test facility team, which oversaw the procurement of equipment in record time, including the giant cryostat chamber delivered from China in October. The first magnet to be tested, TF07, was inserted today in the test chamber (see this article).
The Installation/Assembly/Construction Team Award went to the transversal team for the rotation of vacuum vessel sectors 1 and 4 for repair, which developed and executed a novel handling approach (rotating the sectors outdoors) to enable the repair of the inaccessible side of vacuum vessel sectors #1 and #4, and in this way supported the project’s critical path by avoiding bottleneck in Assembly Hall tooling.
The Best Support of the ITER Project Award went to the ITER cleaning staff team for consistently taking care of buildings and offices across the ITER site, providing the highest quality of service with kindness and courtesy.
The Special Contribution Team Award went to the nuclear safety team for its track record in rebuilding trust with the French nuclear safety regulator ASNR, for working through issues of licensing strategy, and for the instillation of nuclear safety culture across the project. (Recognized as part of this group is the transversal unit working to exempt the ITER vacuum vessel from nuclear pressure equipment.)
The Director's Choice Award this year went to the vacuum vessel sector module installation team/machine assembly team, including the CNPE consortium for doing, in the words of Director-General Pietro Barabaschi, “what I was told by others that it was impossible to do”—that is, install three sector modules in 2025. (The installation of another three is programmed in 2026.)
For the first time during an ITER Awards ceremony the Director-General also chose to recognize an individual—Head of the Construction Project Sergio Orlandi—for his contributions to the project.
The large crowd (1,600 registrations) enjoyed demonstrations of martial arts, juggling, diabolo prowess, and dancing by the French Wushu Martial Arts group Kung-Fu Academy and the Guizhou Acrobatic Troupe before dinner and dancing.
