They had worked together for 10 years. And on Thursday 20 June, they gathered one last time to reflect on what they had accomplished: the successful manufacturing and testing, under Europe's supervision, of the four largest ring-shaped superconducting magnets ever designed.
Director-General Pietro Barabaschi, who joined ITER in the early 1990s when the project was entering the Engineering Design Activities (EDA) phase, remembered when the machine's poloidal field coils were "just drawings." Alessandro Bonito Oliva, who before becoming head of the Tokamak Program at ITER managed the magnets program of the European Domestic Agency for more than 15 years, recalled the time when, in the entire fusion ecosystem, "no more than 20 people had experience in the manufacturing of large superconducting magnets." Pierre Gavouyere-Lasserre, Europe's Deputy Project Manager for poloidal field coils, reflected on the (relative) emptiness of the vast facility today "much like it was in 2014, when it all started." And Marc Lachaise, who was appointed Director of the European Domestic Agency in February 2023, praised the hundreds of workers whose "resilience and creativity" had made this unique industrial achievement possible: the successful manufacturing and testing, under Europe's supervision, of the four largest ring-shaped superconducting magnets ever designed, ranging from 17 to 24 metres in diameter and weighing between 200 and almost 400 tonnes.
From left to right: Marc Lachaise, Director of the European Domestic Agency Fusion for Energy; Alessandro Bonito Oliva, who before becoming head of the Tokamak Program at ITER managed the European magnets program for more than 15 years; and ITER Director-General Pietro Barabaschi.
In less than ten years, four massive, complex and delicate first-of-kind components came off the production line: two that measured 17 metres in diameter (
