From a drone's perspective

The ITER installation is going up on a 42-hectare platform nestled in the Durance River valley. This striking panoramic view allows the eye to travel from the Luberon range (left) to the Montagne de Lure (right, bathed in a blue haze).

The ITER construction platform will one day be home to 39 buildings and technical areas. From the air, it's easy to see what's in place and what's under construction. Note the preparatory works underway for the Magnet Power Conversion buildings (centre right, square area) and, further on, the columns of the cryoplant.

The Tokamak Pit is "filling in" as work progresses in two daily shifts. To the right, the Diagnostics Building is now flush with ground level and the formwork for level L1 has begun. In the centre, the ring-like fortress of the bioshield rises almost 12 metres above the B2 basement slab.

The ITER cryoplant, under construction at the centre of this image, will be the largest single-platform cryoplant in the world. Fifty massive columns are now in place to support the building structure and heavy equipment.

On the south side of the Assembly Hall, the Cleaning Facility will be the entry point for components requiring pre-assembly, functioning as an airlock to minimize the amount of dust from the platform that gets into the clean environment inside.

Located adjacent to the Assembly Hall, the Radiofrequency Heating Building will be home to the 24 ITER gyrotrons that will each generate microwave beams over a thousand times more powerful than a home microwave oven. It will also host the generators that produce high-power radio frequency waves for the two 45-ton antennas of the ion cyclotron resonance heating system.