In ITER's largest on-site manufacturing facility, work has begun to prepare for the start of industrial activities. The Poloidal Field Coils Winding Facility, a 257-metre-long facility on the ITER platform inaugurated in 2012, will house the fabrication and assembly activities for the largest ring-shaped magnets. Since July, two clean areas have been framed out for coil winding activities and the first crates of equipment have been delivered and stored in preparation for the installation of full winding tooling in November. Six poloidal field coils will encircle the ITER vacuum chamber like so many parallels of latitude to shape the plasma and contribute to its stability by "pinching" it away from the walls. The smallest poloidal field coil (PF1) situated at the top of the machine will be supplied by Russia; the five others are under the procurement responsibility of Europe. Due to the impressive size and weight of the middle coils (24 metres in diameter for the largest, 400 tonnes for the heaviest), Europe will carry out the successive stages of coil manufacture—winding and insulation, resin impregnation, stacking and assembly—on-site. PF6 (at the bottom of the machine) will be manufactured in China, according to the terms of an agreement concluded with the European Domestic Agency. Overhead cranes will travel the length of the 257-metre building to transport the double pancake windings from station to station. The complete process, from winding to finished coil, will take between two and three years per coil. The European agency has divided the manufacturing process for poloidal field coils 2-5 into a number of work packages to cover overall engineering integration, tooling equipment, site and infrastructure, manufacturing and cold testing. Four of six contracts have now been signed, including those for winding tooling (SEA ALP, Italy), site and infrastructure (Dalkia-Veolia, France), and engineering integration (ASG Superconductors, Italy).At the SEA ALP factory in Italy, the winding table and associated auxiliary equipment has been manufactured, assembled and tested, and the first batch of equipment is now on its way to the ITER site. The winding contractor will now be responsible for the installation and commissioning of the equipment in the winding facility as well as for training personnel in its use. The first activity on the winding line will be to use "dummy" conductor made of copper (instead of the real superconducting materials) to commission the winding line; China has delivered two batches of dummy conductor for this purpose that are currently stored in the Poloidal Field Coils Winding Facility. Following this qualification phase, the series production of double pancakes (flat, spiralled coils that are stacked in up to nine layers to form the coil winding packs) can begin.

Since construction of the ground support structure for the Tokamak Complex began in 2010, huge volumes of concrete have been poured to form the edifice's seismic foundations, retaining walls, and basemat. Since November 2014 work has been underway on the Complex's basement-level walls and pillars. But concrete pouring in a nuclear building is never routine, with each pour day marking the end of months of calculations, modellization and painstaking preparation.   For the ITER bioshield—the 3.2-metre-thick "ring fortress" surrounding the machine, whose role is to protect workers and the environment from the radiation generated by the fusion reaction—preparations have been particularly complex. Realizing a "perfect pour" for such a massive and strategic structure is so important that it was practised in a specially constructed full-scale mockup on the platform.   The density of the lattice of steel reinforcement makes the use of traditional concrete vibrators—used to encourage the concrete to reach every recess—impractical. As a consequence, an extra-fluid, self-compacting concrete was selected by the contractors and trialled in the on-site mockup.   At the end of the day 600 m³ of concrete were in place (centre circle), filling over half of the bioshield's circumference. The conclusive results allowed pouring operations to begin. In the early hours of Wednesday, 21 October, workers poured the first 200° segment of the bioshield, in an all-day operation that took some 15 hours to complete.   As dusk settled on the ITER site 600 m³ of concrete were in place, filling over half of the bioshield's circumference. The pouring of the remaining 160° segment is scheduled in January 2016.

The first segments of the ITER cryostat have started on a long journey that will take them from the Larsen & Toubro manufacturing plant in Hazira, on the northwest coast of India, to the ITER site in southern France. On Monday 19 October, following a "flag-off" ceremony that celebrated the successful manufacturing of the first of 54 segments that will constitute the giant vacuum container, packing operations began for the 460-tonne consignment.   It is expected that the long and delicate packing operation will be completed by the end of this month. The segments will then be transported by truck to port and loaded onto a container ship that is scheduled to call at Fos-sur-Mer harbour—the closest to ITER—during the last days of November.   Six 19-ton shells will be delivered to the ITER site by way of "regular" exceptional transport—that is along regular roads. The much larger 60° base sections—six sections, 10 metres long, 8.10 metres wide, 50 tonnes each—will be required to travel along the dedicated ITER Itinerary in two separate convoys of three trailers.   Both convoys are expected before the end of the year at ITER—the first elements of the ITER machine to reach the site.

As the early morning sun shed its pink rays over the ITER site last Saturday 24 October, the first visitors of the seventh ITER Open Doors Day event were already queueing for a front-row view of the spectacular changes that have taken place on the site in the last few months. About 800 visitors, from the region but also beyond, had come to witness first-hand how the ITER Project is slowly but visibly taking shape. Shuttle buses first dropped them off at the ITER Visitors Centre where they were welcomed by a team of volunteers from the scientific and technical departments and also by the Director-General of the ITER Project himself—Bernard Bigot—who spent the day on site speaking with the crowds and leading bus tours. Through access to guides, films, documentation and mockups, the visitors were introduced to science and technology of ITER, the advantages of fusion, the hurdles that remain on the way to fusion energy, and the role of ITER. And then it was time to board the buses again to head to the centre of activity on the worksite. For this edition of Open Doors Day, the public had the exceptional opportunity to gain access to the 60-metre-tall ITER Assembly Building (not yet completed) where the main components of the machine will be prepared and pre-assembled. From this unique vantage point visitors had a stunning view down onto the Tokamak Pit, where work has just begun to pour the circular three-metre-thick bioshield. Representatives of the European Domestic Agency, in charge of supervising and financing all site work, were on hand with technical explanations. Looking overhead to the roof of the Assembly Building, 60 metres above ground level, and then down again 12 metres into bottom of the Tokamak Pit, the visitors had an opportunity to experience the scale of ITER—the scale of the massive construction project, the scale of the machine to come—the largest tokamak in the world—and the scale of the international collaboration that is making it all happen. The next Open Doors Day is planned for the spring of 2016. 

The ITER tokamak will have over 60 diagnostic systems installed to enable plasma control, optimize plasma performance and support machine protection. Two US laboratories, the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in collaboration with industry and universities, are developing the US contributions to ITER diagnostic systems. At this point, six of seven US diagnostic systems are in preliminary design with teams actively investigating physics and engineering issues through testing, prototype development and proof-of-principle activities. "ITER diagnostics will use well-established techniques that are operational on tokamaks around the world. The challenge is designing systems that can withstand the harsh ITER operating environment," said US ITER diagnostics team leader Russ Feder of PPPL. The first tokamak designed to sustain burning plasma, ITER will operate with pulse lengths up to an hour; diagnostic systems will potentially be exposed to high magnetic fields, neutron flux, and intense heat. "ITER will also shake and move a lot. So we have to plan for vibrations and alignment challenges. This makes the physics and the engineering very interdependent," Feder said. "We have made major progress this year across six systems." All of these diagnostic systems will feed information to ITER operators and scientists. One reason ITER has so many diagnostics is to provide redundant systems using different tools for measurement of similar plasma characteristics, confirming measurement accuracy. Right now, teams are working on diagnostic systems across the US. Prototypes and testing are underway, with major recent progress occurring on the electron cyclotron emission diagnostic, the toroidal interferometer and polarimeter, and the upper infrared cameras. 

In recognition of his outstanding contributions in physics, Professor Dr Thomas Sunn Pedersen from the Max Planck Institute of Plasma Physics, IPP, has been elected Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS).   With this distinction his colleagues in the Plasma Physics Section of APS are honouring in particular "his seminal studies of pure electron plasmas in a stellarators," according to the Fellowship Certificate, and for "active stabilization of resistive wall modes"—a special kind of plasma instability in a tokamak.The objective of the American Physical Society is to extend physical knowledge, support physicists worldwide, and promote international cooperation. The venerable society, based in Maryland, US, was established in 1899 and has a present membership of 40,000. No more than half a percent of the members may be elected Fellow.   Read the full report on the IPP website.

​The European Domestic Agency for ITER, Fusion for Energy, announced on 21 October that Johannes Schwemmer, from Germany, has been appointed as its new Executive Director. Fusion for Energy is the European Union's Joint Undertaking for ITER and the Development of Fusion Energy. The organization was created under the Euratom Treaty by a decision of the Council of the European Union in order to provide Europe's contribution to ITER, to support fusion research and development initiatives through the Broader Approach (signed with Japan), and to contribute down the road to the construction of demonstration fusion reactors. Johannes Schwemmer was selected by the Fusion for Energy Governing Board from a list of candidates proposed by the European Commission after an open competition, following a publication in the Official Journal of the European Communities. Read the full announcement on the European Domestic Agency's website.