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Busbar installation | Navigating an obstacle course
What is simple and commonplace in the ordinary world, like connecting an electrical device to a power source, often takes on extraordinary dimension at ITER. Wh [...]
Vacuum vessel assembly | Back in the starting blocks
Close to two years have passed since vacuum vessel assembly was halted when defects were identified in the ITER tokamak's vacuum vessel sectors and thermal shie [...]
A group of fusion researchers has left Padua, Italy, for an 800-kilometre bike trip to the ITER site. Their goal? To share information about fusion energy resea [...]
11th ITER Games | Good fun under the Provencal sun
A yearly tradition in the ITER community for more than a decade now, the ITER Games offer a pleasant way to reconnect among colleagues and neighbours after the [...]
Russia continues to deliver in-kind components to the ITER project according to procurement arrangements signed with the ITER Organization. Some recent manufact [...]
Travelling in nondescript casing, like a mobile home designed by an uninspired architect, the first of nine sectors of the ITER vacuum vessel was delivered to ITER on 7 August. Five days later, as the housing was removed, the jewel was revealed in all its strangeness: a massive, 440-tonne, D-shaped chunk of steel, dotted with hundreds of protruding cylindrical bumps that evoked a perfectly aligned, metallic measles eruption.
Beyond its alien shape and its awesome mission, this unique industrial object carries a strong symbolic dimension. It will stand at the core of the first 1,200-tonne pre-assembly to be installed into the assembly pit.
Once combined and welded, four sectors supplied by Korea and five supplied by Europe will form ITER's toroidal plasma chamber. As for the measles eruption, it is caused by the "flexible support housings" or "cartridges"—1,760 of them in total and approximately 200 per sector—onto which the blanket shield blocks will be attached.
Beyond its alien shape and its awesome mission, this unique industrial object carries a strong symbolic dimension. It will be the first to be "upended" to vertical and placed within the open arms of ITER's tallest assembly tool—one of the twin sector sub-assembly tools (SSATs)—to be associated with two D-shaped toroidal field coils (TF12 and TF13) and corresponding thermal shielding.
Vacuum vessel sector #6 will stand at the core of the first 1,200-tonne pre-assembly—the first to be delivered by overhead crane into the Tokamak pit. Lessons learned on this first pre-assembly operation will contribute to increased ease and faster turnaround times for all other vacuum vessel pre-assembly sequences.
For the moment, the component has been transferred to the far end of the Assembly Hall, where the ITER team has performed a helium leak test. A full report will be published in next week's Newsline.
