Europe's fifth and last ITER vacuum vessel sector arrives at Cadarache, closing a 16-year job
Serguey Asael Shinder1 min readFusion for Energy (F4E), the EU's domestic agency for ITER, has delivered Europe's fifth and final vacuum vessel sector to the ITER site at Cadarache in southern France, World Nuclear News reported on 5 October. The sector left Westinghouse's factory in Monfalcone, Italy, and was transported by DAHER through the port of Fos-sur-Mer.
What a sector is. The vacuum vessel houses the fusion reactions and is the first safety barrier. It is made of nine wedge-shaped steel sectors, each more than 14 metres tall and weighing 440 tonnes. Assembled, the vessel will be 19.4 metres across and about 5,200 tonnes, rising to 8,500 tonnes with the blanket and divertor installed. Each sector is built in four segments and needs more than 1.6 kilometres of welding, to tolerances of a few millimetres.
Who built them. Europe made five sectors and South Korea four; Korea's share grew from two to four under a 2016 agreement, and it delivered its last sector in November 2024. Europe's segments were made by Westinghouse in Monfalcone and Walter Tosto in Chieti, in a consortium with Ansaldo Nucleare. F4E says the five sectors took more than 2 million hours of work and 750 km of weld beads, that all five were delivered in the last two years, and that it used AI to cross-check data from the factories. WNN describes the arrival as the end of a 16-year manufacturing effort and officially the last large ITER component delivered on site.
Where ITER stands. Construction began in 2010. The original first-plasma date of 2018 was moved to 2025 in 2016, and a revised plan announced last year aims for deuterium-deuterium operation in 2035. ITER's goal is 500 MW of fusion power for at least 400 seconds from 50 MW of heating; it will not generate electricity.