Project performing to schedule and cost
The ITER Council held its Thirty-Seventh Meeting from 19 to 20 November at ITER Headquarters.
The annual ITER Council meetings in June and November at the project's headquarters in southern France are as regular as clockwork in the ITER calendar. Delegations from the seven ITER Members—comprising high-level government representatives, heads of institutes, experts and specialists—meet for two days to assess the ITER project's performance over the previous six months on the basis of comprehensive briefings on progress in construction, manufacturing, assembly and licensing. The key outcome of the 37th Meeting of the ITER Council, which concluded on 20 November, is that the project's schedule and cost performance indices have remained above 1.0 for the past two years, demonstrating strong performance against Baseline 2024.
In particular, progress in the assembly of the vacuum vessel—a key schedule driver—has been steady this year. Two completed sector modules (describing a vacuum vessel sector assembled with its thermal shield and two toroidal field coils) left assembly tooling in April and in June and were installed in the tokamak pit, and a third is scheduled to follow next week. The Council also cited progress in the assembly of the central solenoid, production underway on all divertor components, the installation of the first gyrotron, the completion of the bioshield penetrations, and progress in the construction of test benches that are important for project risk mitigation—the magnet cold test facility and the port plug test facility—as positive signs that the project is maintaining pace and performance.
The Council welcomed the continuing engagement with private sector fusion efforts, including the open sourcing of ITER’s scientific simulation software and the planned release of the first volume of the ITER Design Handbook by the end of 2025.