There comes a day when design engineers turn into real operators. For Alessandra Iannetti, who manages the cryopump test facility, for Robert Pearce, who has been involved with cryopump design and engineering for more than three decades, and for the cryopump team that day happened on 1 August. Following months of tests and calibration, the pre-production cryopump inside the facility’s vacuum chamber was cooled down to ~5 K (approximately minus 268 °C, or the temperature of the intergalactic void), gases were injected to simulate plasma operation, and the pumping process started. Once all mechanical connections with the cryolines were established, pumping was tested with helium (the fusion “waste product”) and neon, which has a similar pumping curve to the fusion fuels deuterium and tritium. This marked the last step of a commissioning process that had begun in January. “Performance was even better than we expected,” says Iannetti. “The cryogenics and vacuum teams coordinated seamlessly, and this was a key factor in this historical achievement.”Cryopumps condense gas molecules on very cold surfaces, thus achieving levels of vacuum that are impossible to attain with conventional mechanical pumps. The simple physics principle behind their action—called “sorption,” which describes how a molecule or atom slows down to near immobility when it encounters an extremely cold, porous surface—requires highly sophisticated technologies to implement, as well as a touch of unexpected natural ingredients: the pumps’ cryopanels are coated with coconut charcoal, whose porous structure is more effective than synthetic alternatives in capturing helium at ultra-low temperatures.In ITER, six torus cryopumps are tasked with a double mission: perfecting the high vacuum required in the plasma chamber prior to operation, and evacuating helium ash, unburnt fuel and all exhaust gases during plasma shots. Another two cryopumps will be installed on the cryostat to provide the vacuum that thermally insulates the magnet system from the environment. Procured by Europe, all eight cryopumps have now been delivered.“We now need to make sure that the production cryopumps behave as the pre-production one has,” says Iannetti. Because the cryoplant will also serve the magnet cold test facility presently under construction, slots for testing cryopumps will be limited to two per year in the coming years, beginning in February 2026. This should be enough to test at least four cryopumps before they are installed in the machine.“What we have learned so far from technical results as well as operational coordination and management has provide plenty of precious lessons and given us confidence in our approach to the next phases of the ITER project,” she concludes.

Even after delivery to ITER, a vacuum vessel sector faces a long path before it can be mounted in one of the tools in the Assembly Hall to become a “sector module” or ultimately installed in the tokamak assembly pit. The 440-tonne components need to be tested then “equipped” with hundreds of studs and supports for sensors, cable looms and various measuring devices and prepared for handling by the overhead cranes. The dimensional non-conformities that were detected in the first three sectors to arrive on site, however, resulted in significant detours from this carefully planned roadmap. For sector #8, the most affected of the lot, the "detours" were particularly complex and numerous. From the moment sub-assembly was interrupted in December 2023 to August 2025, when the sector was back in tooling and sector module assembly could restart, its onsite odyssey lasted 20 months. When faced in 2023-2024 with the necessity of repairing three vacuum vessel sectors in parallel, the teams were confronted with daunting challenges. The equipment in the Assembly Hall could only handle two module assembly operations at a time—or, in this very specific case, two repair operations. Because of the planned insertion sequence of sectors in the pit, it was decided that sectors #6 and #7 would be repaired in the sub-assembly tools vertically, to be completed first, while sector #8 would be repaired in the recently vacated Cryostat Workshop where ample space was available.To cope with this unanticipated situation, new procedures had to be defined and tooling adapted. The massive component, as heavy as a fully loaded jumbo jet, needed to be released from the arms of the sub-assembly tool where it was located, pivoted from vertical to horizontal (a reverse “upending”), and transferred to the nearby workshop.  Sector #8 had to be removed from assembly tooling in 2023 to make room for sector #6, which was prioritized for repair due to the planned installation sequence of sector modules. With the return of sector module #6 to the tokamak pit, sub-assembly activities have restarted. However lying on a bespoke steel platform in the Cryostat Workshop, sector #8 would only present one of its sides to the workers and machines tasked with restoring the nominal geometry of its bevel joint regions. Once repairs were finalized on one side, the component would need to be “rotated” in order to make its other side accessible.The highly complex and spectacular handling sequence was carried out in March 2025: the upending tool moved the component from horizontal to vertical; the double overhead bridge crane lifted it and rotated it 180 degrees above the tokamak assembly pit before docking it temporarily while the upending tool was reconfigured for its return. Vacuum vessel sector #8 has been back in sub-assembly tooling since 4 August 2025. Inboard and outboard thermal shield panels will be rotated toward the sector first, followed by a toroidal field coil on each side. Fourteen days later, sector #8 was back in the upending tool and could be returned to the Cryostat Workshop—this time with its second side exposed.Another six months of patient work involving high-tech robots and highly skilled workers and the long parenthesis could be closed. Vacuum vessel sector #8 is now back in sub-assembly tooling to be equipped with its thermal shield and paired with two toroidal field coils. It is scheduled to be back inside the tokamak assembly pit in February 2026—for good this time.

Italian director Enrico Masi has created a poetic documentary that contrasts two visions of our relationship with technology. It is a documentary film that is hard to categorize. It is not a conventional narrative, nor is it, per se, a documentary by common standards. It is ethereal, philosophical, completely uncommented. One thing is sure: watching Terra Incognita, the latest film by Italian director Enrico Masi, leaves you intrigued—and possibly stunned at the same time.“The scope of the film is about a strange phenomenon, which is our human behaviour,” explains Enrico. “Society still fights and kills while we have rights, laws and international relationships and technology at such a high level.” This contradiction bothers Enrico “more than anything else,” and so this became the connecting thread of his new film.It took Enrico seven years to complete the project for which he travelled to France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Switzerland and the United States. There are two protagonists leading us through the “unknown land.” First, a family of eight that has withdrawn from modern civilization after the Chernobyl disaster and who, since that time, lives a simple life without electricity or running water high up in the Italian Alps. The second protagonist is the largest and most challenging scientific and engineering project of our time: ITER. Enrico gives ITER a specific face and a voice—that of Laban Coblentz, in charge of ITER Communication, who was raised in an Amish-Mennonite community in the United States before he joined the US Navy and later became a nuclear engineer. How do these plots fit together, you may ask? Perhaps surprisingly, they do. Following the thought of German naturalist Alexander Von Humboldt, “the two stories move in parallel in search for a new language for the Anthropocene age.”Despite its distinctive nature and choice of topic, the film resists taking a viewpoint. It does not seek to convince. It is not pro-technology or anti-technology—nor really pro- or anti- any issue. Rather, it delivers a series of images and scenes—some provocative in their juxtaposition, all rooted in the human experience—and it leaves it to you, the viewer, to interpret.The film is now available on ARTE, subtitled in a number of languages.Terra Incognita will also be shown at the University of Turin's 3rd PhD Global History of Empires Conference (18-19 September), the International Documentary Film Festival FICBA in Buenos Aires (5 October) and the 23rd BergamoScienza Festival (9 October).   

ITER's assembly wizards will soon have all the elements they need to complete the central solenoid tower. The United States has delivered the sixth and final module needed to complete the ITER central solenoid to the French port of Fos-sur-Mer and the component will arrive at the ITER site next week. The milestone event marks the culmination of more than a decade of engineering, design and fabrication for the first-of-its-kind pulsed superconducting magnet that will sit at the centre of the ITER tokamak. â€œThis is another example of how the ITER project is moving fusion technology and industry forward in the United States and the world, preparing us for a future with practical fusion energy," said Kevin Freudenberg, the US ITER technical director. Freudenberg has been part of the US ITER project since 2007, when he started as the lead analyst for magnet systems.Currently, four of the six modules are stacked and connected in the ITER Assembly Hall. The fifth module has passed site acceptance testing and is being prepared to be added to the stack; the sixth and final module will be placed atop the stack by year end. A spare module is also scheduled to arrive at the ITER site by the end of December.Once completed, the superconducting magnet will stand as tall as a five-story building and weigh 1,000 tonnes.US ITER staff oversaw the design and fabrication of the central solenoid, with the modules fabricated by General Atomics in Poway, California. More than a dozen US companies and organizations also contributed to the superconducting magnet, its support structure and tooling, including ARMEC Corp (Tennessee); Climax (Oregon); Cryomagnetics (Tennessee); Hamill Manufacturing Co. (Pennsylvania); Kamatics Corporation (Connecticut); Keller Technology Corporation (New York); Major Tool and Machine (Indiana); National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (Florida); Petersen, Inc. (Utah); Precision Custom Components (Pennsylvania); Rhinestahl (Ohio); Robatel Technologies (Virginia); and Superbolt, Inc. (Pennsylvania). From its position in the centre of the machine, the tower-like central solenoid allows a powerful current to be induced in the ITER plasma and maintained during long plasma pulses. Four of the six coil packs, called modules, are currently stacked. A fifth is standing in the wings (photo, centre) and the sixth has just arrived in France from the US ITER manufacturer, General Atomics (California). The central solenoid is one of 13 essential hardware systems that the United States is contributing to ITER through the US ITER project, which is managed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory on behalf of the US Department of Energy Office of Science, with contributions from Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and Savannah River National Laboratory. Altogether, more than 600 companies across the United States have contributed to ITER hardware systems.“With the work of our central solenoid team spanning over a decade, the end of one era is drawing near while another begins,” said David Vandergriff, a senior project engineer who has been part of the central solenoid team since joining US ITER in 2016. “This is the culmination of our working toward a common goal of creating the central solenoid to be the heartbeat of ITER, which we think has the potential to change how the world creates and generates energy.”A celebration for central solenoid completion was held in late August at General Atomics. See this video to learn more about the role of the central solenoid in ITER. 

Attention to companies of all sizes interested in fusion business opportunities! The European Domestic Agency for ITER Fusion for Energy (F4E) will be hosting Supply Chain Days in Barcelona, Spain, from 30 September to 2 October 2025. Participation is possible in person or online.Day 1 (30 September) – Contracts DayDay 2 (1 October) – Sustainability DayDay 3 (2 October) – SME DaySee all information on the Fusion for Energy website.

The European Fusion Education Network, FuseNet, is organizing the 6th annual European Fusion Teacher Day on 10 October 2025. The goal is to introduce nuclear fusion to secondary school teachers throughout Europe, to discuss teaching nuclear fusion to secondary school students and to create enthusiasm for the field of fusion at the secondary education level.The event features a domestic session with lectures by local fusion experts on current fusion research in your area, followed by a global livestream during which new (free) educational materials will be presented and keynote speakers from the international fusion community give an inside look into the largest scientific collaboration in the world. Both the domestic and global parts of the event are fully remote.Participation is open to every science and physics teacher in Europe. Participation is free of charge. All participants will receive a certificate of attendance after the event.Find the agenda and more information about registration page on the event webpage. 

The Clean Air Task Force (CATF) has released an updated version of its Global Fusion Map, a public resource that tracks the rapidly expanding international fusion energy landscape.The new edition highlights major additions across private-sector projects, government initiatives, research collaborations, and commercial milestones. Designed for policymakers, industry leaders, journalists, and the public, the tool provides a clear picture of how the field is evolving and where activity is concentrated. The map also illustrates the range of fusion approaches under development worldwide—including magnetic confinement, magnetized target fusion, inertial confinement, and field-reversed configuration—while providing insight into project scale by reported investment. CATF adds a disclaimer stating that " the map has been compiled from publicly available sources and is not exhaustive."  Access the updated CATF Global Fusion Map here: https://www.catf.us/global-fusion-map/.  See the announcement on the CATF website.