1,300 get a real sense of ITER

Saturday 17 May was Open Doors Day on the ITER site. Nearly 1,300 visitors—members of the public as well as the families of ITER employees and contractors—took part in the event, the fourth organized by ITER Communication since 2011.

From 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., regular rotations of shuttle buses conveyed visitors from the public parking lot to the ITER construction platform. While certain chose to start their visit by a guided tour of the work site, others walked at their leisure to the ITER Visitor Centre, where mockups of the machine and the construction site—as well as videos on construction, fusion, or the assembly of the machine—were all starting points for understanding the goals of the ITER Project. Guides were on hand all day to answer questions.

The bus tour of the construction site—organized in collaboration with the European agency in charge of all works on site, Fusion for Energy—made two stops. At the first, visitors entered the 257-metre-long Poloidal Field Coils Winding Facility, where four of the six ITER poloidal field coils will be manufactured. At the second, they were taken as close as possible to the work progressing on the foundations of the Tokamak Complex where explanations on the seismic foundations of the Complex (no longer visible) and the requirements of the foundation slab that will be supporting nearly 400,000 tons of building and equipment were given.