We take a look at the progress being made at the world's largest nuclear facility. 

From a small hill above Vinon-sur-Verdon in southern France, you can see two suns. Right before sunset, the effect is even more startling. One of the two suns has been blazing for the past 4.5 billion years and is slowly setting. The other is being built by thousands of human hands, and is very slowly rising. As the Sun sets, its rays cast a magical glow over a huge construction site, where the world's biggest fusion reactor is being built.

The ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) project, a joint venture by 35 countries, is one of the world's most important scientific projects. The aim of the project is to prove nuclear fusion – a process constantly taking place inside our Sun and other stars – can be utilised on Earth, to produce electric energy on an industrial scale. ITER hopes it will be the first fusion device to sustain fusion power over a long period of time. If successful, it could well signal a direction away from using fossil fuels for good.

Since 1973, global energy usage has doubled. By the end of this century it might actually triple. 70 per cent of humankind's carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere are created through our energy consumption. 80 per cent of all the energy we consume is still derived from fossil fuels. Therefore, replacing these harmful emissions will help hugely with reducing pollution worldwide, and help slow climate change.

The EU has officially pledged to start producing more than half of electric energy from renewable sources by 2030. By 2050, the hope is that the EU will be a fully carbon-neutral society. To achieve this, it is important to find alternative sources of energy, and many believe that nuclear fusion could be the answer to the world's long-term energy needs. 

But before that happens, there is still a long way to go. ITER is not expected to be conducting plasma experiments until 2025, with the facilities not being fully complete and operational until 2035.

We take a look at how this state-of-the-art facility is taking shape.

Text by Bostjan Videmsek In theory, ITER will produce fusion energy 10 times hotter than the sun. The heat is contained by two layers of magnetic coils made of niobium-tin and niobium-titanium. These are the only ITER components manufactured on-site. With diameters between 17 and 24m, they are too large to be built and transported to the site. Photographed in Saint-Paul-lès-Durance, France, 7 October 2020. Photo by Matjaz Krivic A view from above shows the scale of the tokamak chamber before the installation of the vacuum vessels. A tokamak is an experimental machine designed to harness the energy of fusion. Inside a tokamak, the energy produced through the fusion of atoms is absorbed as heat in the walls of the vessel. Just like a conventional power plant, a fusion power plant will use this heat to produce steam and then electricity by way of turbines and generators. Photo by Matjaz Krivic Inside of the tokamak pit, three tower-like alignment tools have been installed for the fitting of the lower parts of the thermal shield. Photo by Matjaz Krivic ©Matjaz Krivic These 20m structures are ITER's sector sub-assembly tools (SSAT) for pre-assembling a vacuum vessel, complete with thermal shields. The word 'tokamak' is a Russian acronym for 'toroidal chamber with magnetic coils', a concept developed in 1957 by the Soviet physicist Igor Golovin. Photographed at Saint-Paul-lès-Durance, France, 6 October 2020. Photo by Matjaz Krivic