WHAT IS ITER?

Ready for machine assembly!
ITER ("The Way" in Latin) is one of the most ambitious energy projects in the world today. In southern France, 35 nations are collaborating to build the world's largest tokamak, a magnetic fusion device that has been designed to prove the feasibility of fusion as a large-scale and carbon-free source of energy based on the same principle that powers our Sun and stars. The ITER Organization has overall responsibility for the successful integration and assembly of over one million components (ten million parts) built in the ITER Members' factories around the world and delivered to the ITER site by the seven ITER Members: a tremendous logistics and engineering challenge! An assembly workforce of approximately 2,000 people will be needed at the height of assembly activities. The ITER Project noted in June 2020 that project execution towards First Plasma is nearly 70 percent complete. See the Milestones page for a series of incremental assembly milestones on the way to First Plasma and take a virtual tour of ITER construction.

WHO IS PARTICIPATING?

The ITER Project is a globe-spanning collaboration of 35 nations. As signatories to the ITER Agreement, concluded in 2006, the seven Members, China, the European Union, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and the United States, will share of the cost of project construction, operation and decommissioning. They will also share the experimental results and any intellectual property generated by the operation phase.

Europe is responsible for the largest portion of construction costs (45.6 percent). The remainder is shared equally by China, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and the US (9.1 percent each).

The Members deliver very little monetary contribution to the project: instead, 80% of contributions will be delivered to the ITER Organization in the form of completed components, systems or buildings.

The ITER Organization has also concluded non-Member technical cooperation agreements with Australia, in 2016 and Kazakhstan in 2017. A Memorandum of Understanding with Canada agreeing to explore the possibility of future cooperation and a Cooperation Agreement with Thailand (2018).

MANUFACTURING FOR ITER

All the participants to the ITER Project are involved in the procurement of machine components and plant systems. The distribution of in-kind fabrication tasks was based both on the interests and the technical and industrial capacities of each of the Members. The fabrication of key components is shared broadly - for example, the fabrication of the vacuum vessel sectors is shared between Europe (5 sectors) and Korea (4 sectors); divertor manufacturing and testing is divided between Europe, Russia and Japan; the blanket system will be produced by China, Europe, Korea, Russia and the United States.
The ITER Organization has already signed nearly 100 Procurements Arrangements with the ITER Domestic Agencies , which in turn, contract out to industry for the fabrication of the component according the Procurement Arrangement. Since the beginning of the process, more than 2,800 contracts for design or fabrication have been awarded by the ITER Domestic Agencies. Today, in factories on three continents, the components and systems of the ITER plant are taking shape and travelling along the ITER Itinerary.