ITER jacketing facility under construction in Japan

A groundbreaking ceremony for the ITER jacketing facility was held at the Nippon Steel Engineering Facility in Kokura, Kyushu, Japan last Thursday. A traditional Shinto ceremony took place for the safe and successful construction of the facility in which 25 percent of the ITER toroidal field conductors and all of the central solenoid conductors will be jacketed. The conductors with a current-carrying capacity of 45 kA at 13T and 70 kA at 12T will have a total length of 68 kilometres.

The contract with Nippon Steel Engineering was placed by the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA). The ceremony was attended by about 40 representatives of Nippon Steel Engineering Group companies, the Japanese Domestic Agency, and the ITER Organization.

The cost of the construction contract is about EUR 30 million. The jacketing facility, to be constructed over the next 12 months, consists of an equipment hall about 80 m by 40 m, that houses welding, inspection, compaction and spooling machines, and a one-kilometre-long double roller bench. There is also a building to hold the pre-assembled empty steel jacket until the superconducting cable is pulled into it.

This is the second conductor fabrication facility being built under the ITER framework. The first, at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Hefei, China, is of a comparable size and will be used to jacket about 75 percent of the poloidal and 10 percent of the toroidal field conductors. The civil engineering construction in China is finished and the equipment installation is underway.