At the heart of this jumble of machinery is a doughnut shaped vessel 6 metres across and 2.4 metres high (19.6 x 7.8 ft), although this is obscured by the myriad heating, cooling and measuring systems which surround it.

Some examples of these: the large orange limbs are iron, for concentrating the magnetic field that controls the hot gases inside the vessel, at temperatures up to 200 million degrees. The tall white tower in the right foreground houses the eight neutral beam heaters, which use 100 000 volts to shoot gas into the vessel. On the smaller white cylinder to its right are an array of mirrors for directing lasers into the hot gas to measure its temperature and density with Thompson Scattering. The white box in the left foreground is an apparatus to measure the energy of neutrons - the essential product of fusion. At far left the segmented white tower is the Pellet Injection Box, which fuels the experiment with tiny ice cubes of fuel at minus 260 degrees celsius.