What’s New

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.