FPN10-17

More on ITER Progress

March 6, 2010

The ITER European Domestic Agency has signed a contract with a French consortium of companies to construct the Poloidal Field (PF) Coil Winding Facility. In the 253 meter long building, six PF coils, ranging in diameter from 8 to 24 meters, will be wound. The facility will be at the ITER site because the coils are "simply too big for transport." Construction will start in the Summer of 2010 and will be the first of 39 buildings to be erected on the ITER platform.

The Japanese ITER Domestic Agency and Nippon Steel Engineering have completed the compaction and spooling of the first dummy copper conductor unit for ITER's Toroidal (TF) Field Coils, with a length of 760 meters. The dummy TF conductor is a necessary step before superconductor cable-in-conduit is fabricated. A 900 meter long industrial jacketing line has been set up to fabricate the Japanese share of the TF and Central Solenoid (CS) conductors. The first superconductor cable-in-conduit lengths are now being fabricated.

The U.S. ITER Project Office has awarded a Basic Ordering Agreement to AREVA Federal Services of Charlotte, North Carolina. for design and fabrication of the Tokamak Cooling Water System, a major U.S. contribution to the ITER project. Specific work tasks will be authorized by individual task orders, which are expected to number approximately 30.

ITER Director-General Kaname Ikeda and the Head of the Indian ITER Domestic Agency, Shishir Deshpande, signed a Procurement Arrangement (PA) for supply of the radio-frequency power sources for the ITER ion cyclotron heating and current drive systems. A total of 20 Megawatts of RF power will initially be available for the system. The value of the PA is approximately 27.8 million Euros.

A Procurement Arrangement (PA) has also been signed between the ITER Organization and the Russian ITER Domestic Agency for the High Heat Flux Testing of ITER's Plasma-Facing Components (PFC) . The testing will be performed at a new facility under construction at the Efremov Institute in St. Petersburg by means of an 800 kilowatt (60 kilovolt) electron beam. ITER's PFC's are designed to cope with heat loads of up to 20 Megawatts per square meter.

Following approval by the ITER Council in November 2009, a new Neutral Beam Test Facility, in Padua, Italy, is now part of the ITER baseline. The Consorzio RFX is in the process of finalizing details before construction begins. The facility will consist of two test stands, one for testing negative ion sources and one for testing a full-size 1 Megavolt ITER neutral beam injector. Europe, Japan and India are contributing to the project, the building for which are being provided by Italian research institutions. The ITER neutral beam system must operate at full power for periods up to about 3600 seconds.

For additional details on ITER progress, visit http://www.ITER.org and click on Newsline.