Full house for 3rd ITER Open Doors Day
4 Jun 2013
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Iris Rona
A unique occasion to visit the PF Winding Facility before it's equipped for the winding and assembly of ITER's poloidal field coils, the huge circular coils that will be positioned horizontally around the toroidal field magnet system. The circular spread beam, overhead, will transport assemblies of up to 40 tonnes.
Spring 2013 may have been the coldest in southern France in over 25 years, but luckily Saturday 1 June, the first day of the meteorological summer, was warm and sunny and the weather conditions were perfect for the third ITER Open Doors Day.
To give the public an overview of the progress on site since the last time ITER opened its doors, visitors were first driven up to the ITER Visitors Centre which offers a panoramic view of the 42-hectare ITER platform. In addition to explanations provided by ITER guides, visitors had access to a short film explaining the background and the challenges of the project, mockups of the ITER Tokamak and the construction site, a 3D video of the inside of the machine, and a workshop on the biodiversity of the site.
Bus tours left every 20 minutes from the Visitors Centre for the second part of the program: a guided tour of the worksite. The highlight of this year's site tour was a stop inside the 257-metre-long Poloidal Field Coils Winding Facility where five of the six ITER poloidal field coils will be manufactured. The huge 40-tonne circular spreader beam overhead particularly impressed the visitors.
Thirteen hundred visitors participated in the third Open Doors Day. Feedback on the day's events was again very positive, so rendez-vous next year at Open Doors Day #4!