A young man had hitchhiked the previous day all the way from Rouen, Normandy, covering approximately 1,000 kilometres to be on time for the opening of ITER’s doors to the public on Saturday 17 May. Families had come from Austria, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Italy and Spain and—of course—from neighboring towns and villages. All in all, 700 people of all ages participated in the most recent ITER Open Doors Day, an event that has been organized twice a year since 2011. The timing of the 2025 spring edition could not have been better. With one sector module now installed in the machine assembly pit, another two suspended in Assembly Hall tooling (one just docked and another in the final stages of the sub-assembly process) plus a tall central solenoid tower in construction, visitors were treated to a view of some of the most spectacular machine components and assembly activities during their 45-minute walking tour of the principal ITER assembly spaces.Seeing ITER in construction is an exhilarating experience, but understanding the science, technology and industrial challenges behind the one-of-a-kind components and systems is even more rewarding. On Saturday, 75 experts from the ITER Organization and partners volunteered their time to provide explanations, describe processes and answer questions.See some of the scenes from the day in the gallery below.

Only three more to go! With the arrival of sector #4 on 9 May 2025, there are now six ITER vacuum vessel sectors on site. Nine are needed to form the complete plasma chamber. These days, it's all about vacuum vessel sectors. Sectors arriving from abroad, sectors finalized as modules ready for the tokamak pit, sectors transferred between tools ... everywhere you look there are spectacular handling, transfer and construction activities underway at ITER related to the 5,000-tonne plasma chamber that will be critical to ITER science—the vacuum vessel. Activities that had been put on pause during the repair campaign of critical components have been back underway since September 2024 and the assembly teams at ITER are maintaining the pace—even performing slightly ahead of schedule. Vacuum vessel sector #4 has been transferred to a storage area inside the former Cryostat Workshop. It is still wrapped in a tarpaulin, but its protective housing has been removed (the housing is visible in the background). For the European Domestic Agency Fusion for Energy, which delivered sector #5 in October, the delivery of sector #4 last week is the second of five expected. Watch a video from Fusion for Energy on the completion of sector #4 that celebrates the many years of development behind this achievement and the successful collaboration of European contractors.

On a clear late morning last week, our drone operator captured this spectacular view of the international territory that hosts the ITER installation. Four times as large as the Vatican City State, but slightly smaller than the Principality of Monaco, the ITER enclave covers 180 hectares, of which about half is occupied by buildings and infrastructure. The land was conceded by France to the ITER Organization in 2010, and will be returned once ITER has completed its scientific program. Fifteen years after construction work was launched, in the summer of 2010, the 42-hectare platform at the heart of the enclave has acquired its quasi-final appearance. Civil works are now complete and the only "missing" structure is the Hot Cell & Radwaste Facility that will sit next to the Tokamak Complex, facing the boomerang-shaped Headquarters Building of the ITER Organization.  The drone hovers above a 665-tonne component stored on the ITER platform—the top lid of the ITER cryostat. In the top right quadrant of the photo, a worker in yellow (look closely!) gives a sense of the component's scale. (Photo EJF Riche - ITER Organization) Other aerial photos from the latest campaign will be posted soon to the image library of the ITER website.