ITER Cable Management

In the last couple of months, all ITER Organization technical departments were fully engaged in preparing Baseline documents and presentations for the various advisory boards and the fifth ITER Council which will be held next week, 18-19 November.

In parallel, the Central Engineering & Plant Support (CEP) Department made considerable efforts in establishing the work plan for 2010. This year, we successfully concluded three Procurement Arrangements for ITER's electrical power distribution and the cooling water system. The year 2010 will again be very busy as we will have to prepare the Procurement Arrangements for the AC/DC converter, the cryoline and cryodistribution, for fuelling, the tritium plant individual systems, etc.

We have also put high priority on cable management, which is still in an early stage and which needs a lot of support from the Domestic Agencies and the responsible officers. Taking this as an opportunity, I would like to introduce the scope of work, status and work plan for cable management which will be one of the CEP Department's main responsibilities from 2010 on.

ITER, being a large research facility, will be made of a combination of large conventional industrial equipments, such as the cooling water system, and challenging new high-tech components such as diagnostics, superconductive magnets, etc. To ensure the future operation of all ITER subsystems, a large amount of power and control cables will have to be identified, designed, routed and installed.

The expected total amount of cables to be managed is on the order of 100,000, which is about twice the number required for a 1.4 GW nuclear power plant. The manpower required for this task is on the order of 120 PPY (professional persons per year) over a period of approximately eight years.

The responsibility for the management of all ITER power and control cables has been assigned to the Electrical Engineering Division, which is currently setting up the database—a necessary tool to efficiently execute cable management. The tool will be based on IGE-XAO software package, which has also been adopted in other large projects and which is already being used by the ITER Design Office for the production of circuit diagrams. A pilot case has already been successfully performed to verify the capacity of the selected tool; final customization will be completed during 2010. In parallel with this activity, the upload of cable data into the central database is already in progress.

ITER cable management task is expected to be more complex and challenging than in large power plants or large research facilities. To get the necessary expertise and manpower, a specific support contract will be placed in 2010.