[Video] A drone takes you on a tour of the Iter construction site

At the end of 2023, the Iter Organization, an international collaborative effort involving the European Union, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia, and the United States, released a video offering a drone tour of its facility. This video, dated October, showcases the progress of the world’s largest nuclear fusion construction project.

The Iter project is a significant scientific and industrial initiative aimed at demonstrating the feasibility of controlled nuclear fusion using tokamak technology. Mastering fusion could provide humanity with a clean and inexhaustible energy source.

The video reveals the current state of the construction site, including enormous components waiting to be installed, such as the cryostat lid designed to encase the vacuum chamber and the superconducting magnets, thereby creating an extremely cold vacuum environment. It also highlights the “necessary repairs on two types of essential components for the tokamak’s operation”: the thermal shields and the vacuum chamber sectors. The organization is developing a new roadmap to accommodate the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and these repairs on the project’s timeline.

Nuclear fusion is garnering significant global interest as it represents a massive, safe energy source with minimal environmental impact, no long-lived high-activity waste, and no risk of nuclear proliferation. While the European tokamak Jet in the United Kingdom ceased operations at the end of 2023, another tokamak, the JT-60SA, began operating in Japan in October 2023. The JT-60SA, constructed and funded by Japan and the European Union, will contribute valuable insights to the Iter project.■