ITER Hands Over Vacuum Vessel Sector #3, Closing Three-Year Bevel Repair Campaign

ITER's contractor SIMANN (SIMIC/Ansaldo Nucleare) officially handed over vacuum vessel sector #3 to the assembly team on September 2, 2026, after a summer of intensive work completing bevel repairs — the weld edges where sectors join to form the tokamak's plasma chamber — plus outer-shell instrumentation and inner-shell boss welding. Sector #3 carries 120 sensors for measuring magnetic field during operation. The handover closes a nearly three-year campaign that repaired dimensional irregularities in vacuum vessel bevels across all affected sectors, one of the defects that triggered the 2024 Baseline schedule revision.