A finger on the installation’s pulse

In a comprehensive new article in Nuclear Fusion, ITER Director-General Pietro Barabaschi and colleagues outline the progress of ITER and reaffirm the project’s central role in bringing fusion energy from experimental science to industrial reality. 

After a period of restructuring, contract adjustments, and technical recovery, the project is now advancing under a revised plan known as Baseline 2024, designed as a realistic and achievable path to the first experiments, deuterium operation, and ultimately deuterium-tritium fusion with a gain of Q ≥ 10. Over the past two years, the organization has reported its strongest performance to date, maintaining schedule and cost targets while accelerating assembly and manufacturing activities. 

Major milestones include completion of all superconducting magnets, start of series production of tungsten plasma-facing components, and renewed progress in tokamak assembly following successful repairs to key elements. Large plant systems such as the cryogenic infrastructure are operating, and critical test facilities are coming on line as the project transitions from construction to integrated commissioning. 

The authors describe how, despite the emergence of new fusion actors, ITER’s mission is unchanged: to demonstrate integrated, industrial-scale fusion and provide the knowledge and technology needed for future power plants. In that sense, they argue, ITER is not competing with the expanding fusion ecosystem—it is laying its foundation. 

Barabaschi, P., Artola, F. J., Oliva, A. B., Carannante, G., Coblentz, L., Encheva, A., Giniiatulin, R., Grillot, D., Hunt, R., Jachmich, S., Kamada, Y., Kim, S., Loarte, A., Marquez, A., Merola, M., Noh, C. H., Nunes, I., Orlandi, S., Perrier, G., . . . Veltri, P. (2026). Progress of ITER and its importance for fusion development. Nuclear Fusion. https://doi.org/10.1088/1741-4326/ae4d5c

The program for this summer's 15th ITER International School is now available and pre-registration is open on the event website.

Since its launch in 2007, every ITER International School has focused on a specific theme. The 15th School, to be held in Chengdu, China, from 20–24 July 2026, will explore the engineering of heating and current drive systems as well as the physics processes undergirding their use for plasma heating, current drive, and the control of plasma scenarios in ITER and other magnetic fusion devices.

The organizers of the event—the Engineering & Technical College of Chengdu University of Technology and the Southwestern Institute of Physics (SWIP)—have now opened the webpage for pre-registration. The program for the five-day event is also consultable on the website. 

Visit the 15th ITER International School website for all information or to pre-register.

Download the 2026 School poster here.

The Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics is reporting that physicists have, for the first time, explained the sudden formation of high-confinement mode (H-mode) in tokamaks using simulations based purely on fundamental physical principles. First observed in 1982 on the ASDEX tokamak in Garching, H-mode dramatically improves plasma energy confinement and is considered essential for future fusion devices, including ITER. Yet despite decades of experimental and theoretical work, scientists had not fully understood why the transition occurs at a specific heating power.

Led by Wladimir Zholobenko, IPP researchers performed advanced “flux-driven” edge simulations with the GRILLIX code, allowing the plasma to evolve naturally as heating power increased step by step. Unlike earlier models, the transition was not imposed but emerged self-consistently from turbulence dynamics. Simulating just 50 milliseconds of plasma evolution required a year of supercomputer time.

The simulations show that after a gradual buildup of turbulence, heat transport at the plasma edge abruptly reverses. Within 100 microseconds, the characteristic H-mode pedestal—a steep pressure and temperature gradient—forms. The transition is linked to a sudden shift from drift-wave turbulence to kinetic ballooning modes, along with a rapid reorganization of microscopic fluctuations. The model even predicts a brief inward heat flow before transport stabilizes.

Based on conditions from ASDEX Upgrade, the simulation shows that it reproduces exactly those effects that can also be observed in experimental results. However, the researchers have not yet been able to achieve satisfactory quantitative agreement—in other words, the actual measurements from ASDEX Upgrade are either above or below the simulated results.“We haven't reached our goal yet, but the simulations provide insight into what is still missing,” says Dr Zholobenko. The aim is to end up with a simulation model that can predict the experimental parameters at which H-mode occurs in fusion facilities that have not yet been built.

The findings were published in Physical Review Letters. 

See the original report on the IPP website.

Since 2019, ITER Japan has been publishing a manga series that brings the ITER project to life for a broad audience. 

The story follows Japanese student Taiyô Tenna, who discovers ITER while on a world tour after meeting a French student in Aix-en-Provence. His journey continues through an internship experience at ITER, and then as he returns to Japan to learn more about the advanced fusion technologies developed by Japan’s Domestic Agency for the project. In the eighth volume, just released, he has become a staff member at the National Institutes for Quantum Science and Technology (QST), where he learns about ITER's new baseline scope and schedule and the ways in which Japan's flagship fusion device, JT-60SA is participating.

Explore all volumes of the ITER manga series on the ITER Japan website or download Volume 8 from ITER's Publication Centre. Editions are available in Japanese, English, French and ... Provençal.