Subscribe options

Select your newsletters:

Please enter your email address:

@

Your email address will only be used for the purpose of sending you the ITER Organization publication(s) that you have requested. ITER Organization will not transfer your email address or other personal data to any other party or use it for commercial purposes.

If you change your mind, you can easily unsubscribe by clicking the unsubscribe option at the bottom of an email you've received from ITER Organization.

For more information, see our Privacy policy.

News & Media

Latest ITER Newsline

  • Image of the week | More cladding and a new message

    As the October sun sets on the ITER worksite, the cladding of the neutral beam power buildings takes on a golden hue. One after the other, each of the scientifi [...]

    Read more

  • Cryodistribution | Cold boxes 20 years in the making

    Twenty years—that is how long it took to design, manufacture and deliver the cold valve boxes that regulate the flow of cryogens to the tokamak's vacuum system. [...]

    Read more

  • Open Doors Day | Face to face with ITER immensity

    In October 2011, when ITER organized its first 'Open Doors Day,' there was little to show and much to leave to the public's imagination: the Poloidal Field [...]

    Read more

  • Fusion | Turning neutrons into electricity

    How will the power generated by nuclear fusion reactions be converted into electricity? That is not a question that ITER has been designed to answer explicitly, [...]

    Read more

  • Fusion world | JET completes a storied 40-year run

    In its final deuterium-tritium experimental campaign, Europe's JET tokamak device demonstrated plasma scenarios that are expected on ITER and future fusion powe [...]

    Read more

Of Interest

See archived entries

ITER NEWSLINE -

Assembly Hall

An ever-changing landscape

The view from the gangway, 55 metres above the floor of the Assembly Hall, is an ever-changing landscape. The 6,000-square-metre staging area accommodates only two permanent features: the twin sector sub-assembly tools (SSAT1 and SSAT2) designed to assemble the massive vacuum vessel sectors, toroidal field coils and thermal shield segments into sector modules. All around them, the movement of workers, elevated platforms, forklifts, rigging elements and giant components composes a slow-motion spectacle—half mechanical ballet, half construction game.

Close to 100 metres from door to wall: the Assembly Hall povides a 6,000-square-metre shop floor to receive, equip and pre-assemble the massive components required for the ITER machine. (Click to view larger version...)
Close to 100 metres from door to wall: the Assembly Hall povides a 6,000-square-metre shop floor to receive, equip and pre-assemble the massive components required for the ITER machine.
The latest arrival (1) in this view taken on 8 April 2022 is vacuum vessel sector #8, manufactured in Korea and delivered to ITER on 1 April. Like a fossilized alien life form, the component has shed its protective cocoon (2), which now stands empty at the lower left of the image.

Close to the newly arrived sector, a toroidal field coil (#9 from Europe), lies in the upending tool (3). Soon, the tool will be moved to its vertical orientation and the magnet coil will be transferred to SSAT1 to be assembled with the second vacuum vessel sector, which has already been equipped with a thermal shield segment (4). A few metres away, SSAT2 holds a close-to-finalized sector module (5), scheduled to be installed in the assembly pit (6) in the coming weeks.

To the right of the twin assembly tools, an area (7) is dedicated to the assembly of the US-procured central solenoid modules.  Of the three cylindrical elements, the greenish one is the first module, delivered to ITER in September 2021. The yellow tool to the left is the lifting fixture that will used to move the modules to the assembly platform (grey) and stack them one atop the other in order to form the 18-metre tall, 1,000-tonne central solenoid.

The structure along the wall, on the right side of the Hall (8) is part of the support system for the waveguides that will connect the gyrotron sources in the Radio Frequency Building to the tokamak machine.

As these lines are being written, the scene in the Assembly Hall has already been transformed, with the house-like cocoon for vacuum vessel sector #8 moved to temporary storage and readied for dismantlement. 

 

return to the latest published articles