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. ITER Council Chair Massimo Garribba (Europe) addresses Member delegations during the Thirty-Seventh Meeting of the ITER Council. 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.Read the IC-37 press release in English or French.

The ITER Organization has begun recruitment for its 2026 internship program.We invite students from across the ITER Members (the People's Republic of China, the European Union, India, Japan, the Republic of Korea, the Russian Federation, the United States) to apply for one of our exciting internship opportunities. All Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD students enrolled in a fully accredited degree program are eligible to apply. Internships are offered for up to six months and are extendable to up to one year under certain circumstances. The first wave of the campaign runs from 15 November 2025 through 6 January 2026, with the publication of 28 offers on the ITER website. A second-wave campaign will be advertised from 17 January 2026 through 28 February 2026.See this page to apply. The deadline for first-wave opportunities is 6 January 2026.

The WEST tokamak in France, with its tungsten divertor, is exploring the plasma physics of operation in a tungsten environment.Research on WEST is directly relevant to ITER, helping to answer questions such as "How will the actively cooled tungsten components of the ITER divertor behave after hours of plasma discharge?" or "Can performant plasmas be produced if plasma-facing components are damaged?" or "How can the monitoring system be optimized for these components?" In a six-week campaign that started on 7 November, the team is testing the performance of a tungsten coating on tiles in collaboration with ITER, running experiments to test the "I-mode" regime (an ELM-free improved confinement regime with low impurity content) in collaboration with American and Chinese collaborators, and studying the growth of deposits on the divertor under high particle fluence.The WEST tokamak (for W Environment in Steady-state Tokamak) is located at the Institute for Magnetic Fusion Research (IRFM) near ITER, part of the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission's (CEA's) Cadarache Centre.See the article published on the CEA IRFM website.