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High above the concrete fortress that will house the ITER Tokamak, a steel lattice of pillars and beams will soon rise to complete the structure—both providing a roof (once covered over with cladding) and providing sheltered manoeuvring room for the heavy assembly cranes that will be travelling back and forth from the Assembly Hall carrying components.

Twenty steel pillars (ten on either side) will support the roof structure as well as resist the tremendous forces exerted by the movement of the bridge cranes.

The lower segments of the pillars (see photo) will be directly anchored in the concrete of the Tokamak Building, either on concrete columns or on weight-bearing "brackets" called corbels. The rest of the roof structure will be assembled in five modules on the ground and lifted into place by crane.

The roof of the Tokamak Building will weigh approximately 2,000 tonnes.

Read the full story on the Fusion for Energy website.

Researchers from the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center, PSFC, and the University of Texas at Austin have had promising results in terms of plasma stability in experiments with "negative triangularity" on the DIII-D tokamak; that is, with reversing the conventional shape of the plasma in the tokamak chamber.

In results published recently in Physical Review Letters and Physics of Plasmas, researchers Alessandro Marinoni (MIT) and Max Austin (UT Austin) discovered evidence that reversing the conventional shape of the plasma in the tokamak chamber can create a more stable environment for fusion to occur, even under high pressure.

Marinoni and colleagues are planning future experiments to further demonstrate the potential of this approach in an even more fusion-power relevant magnetic topology, based on a "diverted" tokamak concept.

Read more on the subject on the PFSC website.

At ITER's Neutral Beam Test Facility, one testbed has been launched and another is in the procurement/assembly phase.

SPIDER—the ITER-scale negative ion source—turned on last year. Experiments on MITICA—a full-size prototype of ITER's 1 MV heating neutral beam injectors—are scheduled beginning 2022. Procurement is underway in Europe on the beam source and at Consorzio RFX in Padua, Italy, work is underway to install auxiliary components and systems.

In May, the first part of the MITICA beam source vacuum vessel was installed (photo). This stainless steel component was procured by the European Domestic Agency, Fusion for Energy, as a voluntary contribution to the ITER neutral beam development program.

See more about the manufacturing of the vessel here.

See more about the Neutral Beam Test Facility at Consorzio RFX here.