From paper to reality

The design review process for the 32 ITER buildings has reached a major milestone. This week we finished the last big package in a series of detailed design reviews: the nuclear buildings including the Tokamak Complex, the Tritium Plant, the Diagnostic Building and the seismic isolation basemat. Engineers from ITER Organization and the European Domestic Agency (in charge of constructing the ITER buildings) worked together with external experts to go over detailed designs prepared by Jacobs Engineering, an external company that had been working for the last nine months towards this date.

This is an important moment for our Organization: we are now getting ready to lay the first foundation stone. Three corresponding Procurement Arrangements—one to select the Architect/Engineer, one to begin the excavation of the Tokamak Complex basement and the support structures, and one beginning the procurement process for the anti-seismic bearings—are scheduled to be signed at the end of March.

From this point on, the call for tenders will be handled by the European Domestic Agency. The office for Civil Construction & Site Support from the ITER Organization will provide further assistance to the European agency wherever possible to progress together towards tender preparation as fast as we can.

We all want to see ITER take shape, evolving from paper to steel and concrete. The future construction is documented in 37 design description documents, 10,000 pages of paper, and more than 800 drawings and fully developed 3D models.

Very soon the huge scrapers and rock crushers that have dominated the scene on the site for the last year will disappear and we will see construction activity, and steel frames and walls going up. The first building to appear will be the manufacturing facility for ITER's huge poloidal field coils that form part of the machine's magnetic confinement system.

In order to facilitate the work between the European Domestic Agency and the ITER Organization we are supporting the initiative for the construction of a new office building next to JWSII, our present Headquarters. This building, termed JWSIII, will be constructed by Agency Iter France (and funded by the European agency), and will allow for close day-to-day coordination among the several hundred staff necessary to oversee the construction of the ITER complex.