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News & Media

Latest ITER Newsline

  • Test facility | How do electronics react to magnetic fields?

    A tokamak is basically a magnetic cage designed to confine, shape and control the super-hot plasmas that make fusion reactions possible. Inside the ITER Tokamak [...]

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  • ITER Robots | No two alike

    More than 500 students took part in the latest ITER Robots challenge. Working from the same instructions and technical specifications, they had worked in teams [...]

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  • Data archiving | Operating in quasi real time

    To accommodate the first real-time system integrated with the ITER control system, new components of the data archiving system have been deployed. Data archivi [...]

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  • Repairs | Setting the stage for a critical task

    Like in a game of musical chairs—albeit in slow motion and at a massive scale—components in the Assembly Hall are being transferred from one location to another [...]

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  • Image of the week | There is life on Planet ITER

    Dated April 2023, this new image of the ITER "planet" places the construction site squarely in the middle. One kilometre long, 400 metres wide, the IT [...]

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Of Interest

See archived entries

In the Tokamak's subterranean world



It's a world that evokes underground quarries, a cathedral carved out of rock, a pyramid's secret chamber... The space between the lower basement slab (B2) and the next-level slab (B1) of the Tokamak Complex is punctuated by 18 giant columns that will rise 30 metres when completed and provide structural support to the Tokamak Building.

In this cavernous space, thousands of embedded plates stud the ceiling, floor and walls like geometric constellations—these will be used to anchor the equipment that must be installed at every level of the building.

The thick walls between the massive columns will house pipe chases, and are made of extra-dense concrete that is formulated with magnetite gravel sourced in Swedish Lapland.

The only sunlight that enters this subterranean realm comes from regular double openings in the bioshield wall, reserved for the magnet feeders that will relay electrical power and cryogens to the ITER magnets.

What is today a vast open space around the Tokamak assembly arena will one day be occupied by the dense piping of the cooling water system primary circuit. Gone will be the cathedral-like space ... replaced by a forest of steel pipes and pumps.


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