Fusion Power Associates 2 Professional Drive, Suite 249 Gaithersburg, MD 20879 phone: (301) 258-0545 fax: (301) 975-9869 e-mail: FusionPwrAssoc@aol.com web: http://fusionpower.org

The companies visited reported that the impact of the earthquake on their production capacity was minimal: none had suffered major damage and the problems encountered had been fortunately very short lived. Although the supply of materials was briefly affected after the earthquake, the problem has now been mitigated and all factories are working normally. Motojima said, "It is with great respect that we witnessed the strong will and motivation of Japanese industry to recover its manufacturing capabilities; this will certainly help the country to recover from the impact caused by the earthquake, tsunami and finally the nuclear accident."

Japanese industry is currently providing massive engineering support to recover the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors. It was confirmed, however, that support in this area is not the same as that needed for fusion: therefore this will have no impact on ITER work. Japanese industry declared its strong commitment to supporting ITER and to doing everything possible to deliver on time.

Motojima said, "Based on what we saw and what was discussed with senior engineers and members of the companies' top-level management, we concluded that the efforts of industry to recover from the earthquake damage were successful—a fact that is highly commendable only four months after the earthquake. There is no evidence that we will have to face critical delays caused as a direct impact of the disaster. However there are other issues which may affect the schedule—in particular the significant financial impact of the earthquake on the Japanese government. A huge amount of financial investment will be required to replace infrastructure in the damaged locations, and also to recover from, and compensate for, the nuclear incident. The Naka site also needs repairs. Efforts will be required by the other six ITER Members in order to reduce the financial burden on Japan for several years in order to support the creation of a realistic and acceptable project schedule. The countermeasures to mitigate the impact on the ITER project are currently under intense investigation by a Special Task Group that reports to the Management Advisory Committee and the High-Level ITER Organization-Domestic Agency Coordinating Meeting."

In June, a contract was signed for the jacketing of the Korean share of the ITER Toroidal Field (TF) conductor cable. The contract, signed between the Korean Domestic Agency (KO-DA) and the Italian Consortium for Applied Superconductivity (ICAS), is for the last step in the manufacturing of the TF conductor before winding. The contract is the first major instance of direct international cooperation between KO-DA and a non-Korean entity involved in the manufacturing of an ITER procurement item and further exemplifies the collaborative nature of the ITER project. The contract between KO-DA and ICAS will cover all of the ITER TF conductor allocated to KO-DA (1 x 760 m dummy conductor, 1 x 100 m superconducting conductor, 19 x 760 m superconducting conductors, and 8 x 415 m superconducting conductors) and is expected to last for three years.

Meetings in China have confirmed the progress being made toward qualifying the manufacturing processes for the ITER Correction Coils. Because the large size and unusual shape of the 18 correction coils make manufacturing a challenge; the qualification stage of coil manufacturing processes is an important step to ensure the manufacturability of these coils within specified tolerances. "The main difficulty in the manufacture of the ITER Correction Coils lies in the very tight tolerances that must be achieved in their final envelope dimensions, due to the narrow space reserved for them between the toroidal field and the poloidal field coils," explains Technical Responsible Officer Arnaud Foussat. "A second challenge is the unusual shape of the coils—non-planar for side coils and planar (but banana-shaped) for the top and bottom coils."

In December 2010, the Chinese Domestic Agency (CN-DA) awarded the contract for the manufacture of ITER Correction Coils to ASIPP (Hefei, China), who had been closely involved in the construction of the EAST Tokamak in China and in R&D activities for ITER magnets. ASIPP is now actively preparing the installation of the manufacturing line for these coils in a dedicated building in Hefei. The selection process of all sub-suppliers should be completed by the end of this year. During meetings in June between the ITER Organization, CN-DA, ASIPP and sub-suppliers—the first in a series to monitor the qualification milestones at sub-suppliers—some of the key manufacturing options that are under development for the 18 Correction Coils and coil structures were highlighted. "It is essential that our colleagues at the ASIPP and the CN-DA select the best manufacturing solution from the point of view of technical requirements, risk management and cost before launching the series production," says Arnaud.

An important Correction Coil milestone to come is the selection and pre-qualification by ASIPP of the supplier for the 316L austenitic stainless steel required for the 20 millimetre-thick Correction Coil case. TISCO, a worldwide leader in stainless steel production and a potential supplier, will supply 316LN hot rolled base plates and extruded profiles in order to produce a short sample case model for the definition of final fabrication processes.

A welding process for Correction Coil case closure has also been selected; to qualify this option, a contract was placed with SIASUN (Shenyang) to supply fibre laser welding production equipment and to provide expertise to ASIPP welders. In a meeting to SIASUN premises, the proposal for an automated laser welding production line was discussed, as well the first test weld samples to be qualified at 4K cryogenic temperatures.

In parallel, ASIPP will collaborate with Institute of Physics and Chemistry (IPC) in Beijing to perform mechanical strength and fracture toughness at cryogenic temperature on welds and base material. "Widespread progress has been made in critical technical areas of the Correction Coils, I am happy to report," stated Arnaud after the visits. "The fabrication process qualification phases ahead will require tight monitoring and the close interaction of all parties in order to keep momentum and progress."

Until ITER is built, science must rely on simulations to find the optimal conditions with which ITER could produce the most energy. A team around Zhihong Lin, physicist at the University of California—Irvine and principal investigator at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), is busy feeding the mighty Jaguar Supercomputer to simulate all of the chaotic movements in a fusion plasma simultaneously. The 35 million hours allotted to his team's project in 2011 will go toward not only simulations of ITER fusion plasmas, but also toward preparing codes for next-generation supercomputers.

A mandatory step in the manufacturing process of the superconducting wires for the ITER magnets is the measurement of the wire performance at each of the suppliers. This quality control step is complemented by an independent verification measurement performed by the Domestic Agency responsible for the supplier. This strict acceptance procedure guarantees that the tight performance specifications of the ITER cables are met. Once the compliance with the specification is verified, the Domestic Agency clears the billet Authorization to Proceed Points (ATPPs) authorizing the fabrication of the superconducting cable, the next phase in the ITER magnet production. It is of obvious importance that the Quality Assurance measurements follow a tight schedule, avoiding delays in the magnet manufacturing. This process was disrupted by the earthquake that hit Japan in March 2011, and dramatically affected operation at the Japanese Domestic Agency. The ITER Organization took swift action to assist the Japanese Domestic Agency by drawing on the capacity present at the ITER Organization Reference and Training Laboratory, a fruit of the CERN-ITER collaboration formed in July 2009. Support came in the form of verification measurements on 12 billets of Nb3Sn bronze route strand for the ITER Toroidal Field magnets, recently produced by one of the Japanese suppliers. The verification measurements consist in critical current, hysteresis loss and residual resistivity ratio measurements of samples coming from each billet. These measurements were carried out with the highest priority at CERN since the time available was quite short. The wire lengths for the samples preparation arrived at CERN on 23 May. About three weeks were necessary for the heat treatment of the material to form the superconducting phase, and the measurement results had to be released by 15 July. Measurements started on 16 June, and the last sample was tested on 13 July. Preliminary data was released during the measurement process, to provide early feed-back on results, and the analyzed data was finally sent to the ITER Organization on 15 July, just making the deadline. All the samples satisfied the ITER specifications and now the Japanese Domestic Agency can proceed in time with the next production step.

On 19 July 2011, the Chinese Domestic Agency for ITER (the China International Nuclear Fusion Energy Program Execution Center) convened the Orientation Meeting on procurement of ITER magnetic power supply equipment. More than 20 domestic power equipment manufacturing companies were present. Mr. Luo Delong, Deputy Director-General of the Chinese Domestic Agency (CN-DA), described the overall situation and implementation of ITER. Responsible officers from CN-DA and relevant technical experts spoke on specific items such as the technical requirements of the magnet power system purchasing tasks to be undertaken by China. According to the ITER Organization's general procurement allocation, China will be responsible for manufacturing three procurement packages related to the magnet power supply system, namely the AC/DC converter, Reactive Power Compensation and Harmonic Filtering, PPEN substation equipment, among which the convert system is the most important subsystem of the ITER machine.

The fourth and last Conceptual Design Review (CDR) for the ITER Cryogenic System was conducted during 20-21 July, successfully meeting all requirements. The main function of the ITER Cryogenic System is to cool down and maintain the required cryogenic operating conditions of the ITER cold components such as the magnets, the cryopumps and the in-tokamak thermal shields. The Cryoplant on the ITER platform will produce the required cooling power at the three required operating temperature levels, namely at 4 K, 50 K, and 80 K. The distribution of cooling power will be accomplished through a set of Cryodistribution cold boxes, which control the cooling power into the ITER cold components by forced flow.

A unique feature of ITER Cryodistribution is the mass flow rate of the cold rotating machines: the machines will have a mass flow rate that ranges up to 3 kg/s whereas existing limits are around 1 kg/sec. Such high flow rates are necessary to satisfy the cooling requirements of the ITER superconducting magnet system ... another unique system in many ways. With the successful conclusion of the Cryodistribution CDR, the conceptual design of ITER's Cryogenic System is now completed and the way paved for the construction of the world's second largest cryogenic facility (following CERN).

For further information on ITER progress, visit http://www.iter.org