Image of the week
Across land and sea
8 Jan 2024
A fourth central solenoid module shipped by US ITER reached the ITER site in the last days of 2023.
This 110-tonne central solenoid module, which arrived in December 2023, is now in storage on the ITER site.
A 2,400-kilometre overland journey from the General Atomics factory in San Diego, California, to the Texas port of Houston; crossing the Atlantic into the Mediterranean, and riding a barge across the Berre inland sea, and finally a 104-kilometre road journey to the ITER site ... that's what it takes to deliver each of the seven "modules" (six plus one spare) that are needed to assemble the ITER central solenoid, an 18-metre-tall, 1,000-tonne electromagnet sitting at the centre of the machine.
As the stacking and connecting of the first two modules progresses in the Assembly Hall, yet another one of these 110-tonne cylindrical components reached ITER in the early hours of 22 December 2023, bringing the total delivered to four.