ITER’s high tech remote handling system has entered its most decisive phase so far thanks to a multimillion deal signed between F4E and Assystem, a leader in innovation and engineering consultancy. All activities ranging from design, manufacturing, delivery, on-site integration, commissioning and final acceptance tests for ITER’s divertor will be covered through this contract as it unfolds progressively. Its value is estimated in the range of 40 million EUR and it will involve some of the pioneers from the area of remote handling in Europe such as the UK’s Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE) and Soil Machine Dynamics Ltd (SMD)together with Finland’s Technical Research Centre (VTT) and theTampere University of Technology (TUT). Through this contract, two multifunctional movers and two toroidal movers will be manufactured.

F4E Director, Professor Henrik Bindslev, explained that “this contract is a turning point for ITER’s remote handling system because it will lead us to production mode. We have managed to bring together industry, fusion laboratories, SMEs and research centres under one contract that will unleash their potential and help them advance further in their domain”. Commenting on the award, Peter Higton, Assystem’s Energy and Nuclear UK Managing Director who has led the team effort, said: “We are very pleased to have been selected for this prestigious project. This contract is recognition that our capabilities and reputation for delivering high standards of innovative engineering, quality and safety are valued by our customers. We look forward to working with F4E and our partners to deliver these high tech components”.

What is remote handling?
Remote handling helps us to perform manually a task without being physically present at the location it is carried out. It is widely used in space exploration missions, underwater or ground operations. The system brings together high tech robotics, advanced technological tools, powerful computers and virtual reality platforms. A high level of intuition and intelligence are inbuilt within the system which is handled by a human operator with extreme dexterity because of the degree of millimetric precision that is required. 

Why ITER needs a remote handling system for the divertor?
When the ITER machine is operational some of the components in the vessel will be exposed to radioactivity. Therefore, any maintenance, inspection and repair will be conducted through remote handling. The ITER divertor, located in the lower part of the ITER machine, will consist of 54 divertor casettes measuring 3,4m x 1,2 m x 0,6m and weighing 10 tonnes each. It is in this part of the machine that the superhot plasma temperature will be most felt. The divertor casettes will form the machine’s massive ashtray where the hot ashes and impurities will fall in. It is foreseen that these components will be replaced three times during the lifetime of the ITER machine.

How will the ITER divertor remote handling work?
The 54 divertor cassettes will be installed by movers through three entry points, known as ports. If they need to be removed, they will be detached, unlocked from the ITER vessel, placed into a container and get transported. 

Source: F4E

A major technological deal has been reached between Fusion for Energy and Air Liquide, gas technology global leader, in order to equip the world’s biggest cryoplant that will cool down the ITER machine to temperatures as low as -269˚ C. The works will be completed in five years and the budget foreseen is in the range of 65 million EUR. The contract covers the engineering, procurement, installation and testing of the facility and auxiliary systems.

Professor Henrik Bindslev, Director of Fusion for Energy, explained that “thanks to ITER, the frontiers of science and technology are pushed further and Europe’s industry is becoming more competitive. To be part of the biggest international energy project means being confident enough to put your expertise to the test and brave enough to take it a step further”. Cristiano Tortelli, Vice-President, Global Air Liquide E&C Solutions, commented: “Our participation to ITER is driven by technological innovation, underpinned by the recognition our of expertise and in line with our committment to invest in tomorrow’s energy mix.”

What is the function of the cryoplant?
Think of the cryoplant as ITER’s massive fridge that will produce and distribute the cooling power in the machine through different networks. The most advanced cryogenic technologies will be deployed to generate extremely low tempratures needed for the ITER magnets, thermal shields and cryopumps. For example, the magnets will be cooled with super critical helium to reach a superconducting state at 4,5 K, close to absolute zero, in order to confine the hot plasma. 

What is the European contribution to ITER’s cryoplant?
Europe will provide the Liquid Nitrogen Plant and and auxiliary systems that will cool down, process, store, transfer and recover the cryogenic fluids of the machine. Two nitrogen refrigetarors will be manufactured along with two 80 K helium loop boxes, warm and cold helium storage tanks, dryers, heaters and the helium purification system. The high performance requirements will be underpinned by high safety standards and a sophisticated operational system.

What are the main elements of the Liquid Nitrogen Plant and auxiliary systems? 
Two nitrogen refregirators with a cooling power of 1 200 kW at 80K will cool down ITER’s Liquid Helium Plant and the 80K helium loop boxes. In addtion, they will supply the purification system, quench tanks, heaters and dryers with nitrogen in liquid or gaseous form. 
The two 80K helium loops will cool down the thermal shields of the cryostat, vacuum vessel, and regenerate the cryopumps. It is estimated that 8 kg of helium per second will be processed.

A helium purification system is planned to recover and clean helium gas from any impurities. The largest components are two quench tanks that each weigh 160 tonnes and meaure 37m by 4.4 m. 

Watch the interview with Xavier Vigor, Head of Air Liquide advanced Technologies (AL-aT), explaining their contribution to the ITER project. 

Source: F4E

W dniu 20 maja b.r. w Instytucie Fizyki Plazmy (IFP) im. Maxa Plancka w Greifswaldzie (północne Niemcy) otwarto wielkie urządzenie termojądrowe - stellarator Wendelstein W7-X. Polskiej delegacji biorącej udział w tej uroczystości przewodził podsekretarz stanu w Ministerstwie Nauki i Szkolnictwa Wyższego, prof. Wodzisław Duch. W skład tej delegacji wchodzili także dyrektor Instytutu Fizyki Plazmy i Laserowej Mikrosyntezy dr hab. prof. Andrzej Gałkowski i jego zastępca ds. europejskiego programu fuzji termojądrowej dr hab. prof. Roman Zagórski. Prof. R. Zagórski przedstawił na spotkaniu w Greifswaldzie wkład Polski do programu budowy i wyposażenia stellaratora W7-X. Dyrektor IFPiLM prof. A. Gałkowski udzielił redaktorkom D. Truszczak z Polskiego Radia i K. Głowackiej z TOK-FM wywiadu na temat tego programu.

Układ Wendelstein W7-X będzie służył do optymalizacji procesu fuzji w plazmie ograniczanej polem magnetycznym w toroidalnej pułapce i dogrzewanej mikrofalami oraz wiązkami atomowymi. W gorącej plazmie w stellaratorze W7-X będą zachodzić reakcje syntezy jąder izotopu wodoru (deuteru) z uwalnianiem energii. Celem badań będzie  stworzenie warunków dla uzyskania maksymalnej energii fuzji. Wyniki badań mogą posłużyć do opracowania w przyszłości stellaratora – reaktora termojądrowego, w którym energia fuzji będzie dużo większa od energii dostarczonej do tego urządzenia. Równolegle z badaniami fuzyjnymi w stellaratorze prowadzone są prace dotyczące budowy we Francji eksperymentalnego reaktora ITER, w którym wykorzystano pułapkę magnetyczną typu tokamak.

Budowa i przygotowanie badań stellaratora W7-X, rozpoczęte przez Niemców, od kilku lat stały się projektem międzynarodowym. Duży udział w tym przedsięwzięciu mają polskie zespoły konstruktorów i naukowców z Instytutu Fizyki Plazmy i Laserowej Mikrosyntezy, Narodowego Centrum Badań Jądrowych w Świerku, Instytutu Fizyki Jądrowej PAN w Krakowie, Politechniki Warszawskiej i Uniwersytetu Opolskiego. Prace polskich zespołów były finansowane przez Wspólnotę EURATOM, Narodowe Centrum Badań i Rozwoju i IFP w Geifswaldzie.

W Instytucie Fizyki Plazmy i Laserowej Mikrosyntezy opracowano i zbudowano dwa kompletne układy diagnostyczne do badania promieniowania rentgenowskiego emitowanego z plazmy w układzie W7-X. Urządzenia te, poczynając od koncepcji fizycznej wspartej symulacjami numerycznymi, poprzez projekt techniczny, aż do budowy ostatecznych wersji układów pomiarowego, zostały wykonane w IFPiLM. Jedno z tych urządzeń, nazwane PHA (ang. pulse height analysis), będzie instalowane w tym roku na stellaratorze w IFP w Greifswaldzie. Drugi układ nazwany MFS (ang. multi foil system) trafi do Greifswaldu w przyszłym roku *). Obie diagnostyki będą stosowane do badań w układzie W7-X przez naukowców z IFPiLM przy współpracy z zespołami z innych ośrodków. Zespół teoretyków z IFPiLM realizował badania właściwości plazmy w komorze stellaratora W7-X metodami symulacji numerycznych.

*) Więcej informacji na temat tych diagnostyk można znaleźć na str. www IFPILM w Annual Report IPPLM 2013, str. 74.

Informacje o otwarciu stellaratora Wendelstein W7-X w Greifswaldzie (Niemcy) można znaleźć także na stronach:

Nobody said it was going to be easy. After years of delays, work has finally begun on key components of ITER, the ambitious international project to build a revolutionary nuclear fusion reactor. ITER remains dogged by its own complexity, however, and its director-general says that it may not now fire up until 2023 – three years later than the most recent official deadline.

ITER's ultimate aim is to generate energy in the same way that the sun does, by fusing hydrogen nuclei to form helium. It will do this by using a magnetic field to confine a superheated hydrogen plasma inside a doughnut-shaped reactor called a tokamak.

A collaboration between China, Russia, India, Japan Korea, the US and the EU, ITER's reactor will be larger and far more intricate than any previous tokamak. It will have as many as 10 million parts – its builders call it the puzzle with 10 million pieces – and will sit at the centre of a vast support system. The result will rival the Large Hadron Collider for the title of most complex machine on earth.

Progress on ITER has been slow – it was first conceived during diplomatic talks between US president Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985. Now, at last, the pieces of the puzzle are falling into place, although most of the ITER site, at Cadarache in southern France, is still barren. That is because the real action is taking place elsewhere.

Sun, sea and steel

The French Riviera is more generally associated with sun and sea than with mega engineering projects. When I visit the facility in La Seyne-sur-Mer where some of ITER's biggest components are being prepared, a fierce mistral is blowing off the land to the Mediterranean. CNIM, the contractor that owns the facility, started out as a shipbuilder before turning to precision engineering. Its maritime location is an advantage: many of ITER's components are so heavy that they have to be transported by sea.

In one of the facility's climate-controlled warehouses, a huge drill is carving channels into a D-shaped loop of high-grade stainless steel- so large that it takes me nearly a minute to walk its circumference. The steel, chosen for its strength at low temperatures, is so tough that the carbide bits milling it must be replaced every eight minutes. It needs to be: seven of these loops will be stacked on top of each other to form one of the many magnets that will confine and direct hydrogen plasma at up to 100 million °C in the reactor vessel.

Before that, though, a complicated journey lies ahead. The loops' next stop will be La Spezia, Italy, where a contractor will fit up to 700 metres of superconducting cable to each one; then they will travel to Venice, where another firm, Simic, will complete their assembly into structures called toroidal field coils, each weighing about the same as a fully laden Boeing 747. Simic is also milling some of the loops, so those will have to make a round trip to La Spezia and back.

The coils will then voyage to a French port, where they will be loaded onto a 800-tonne, 352-wheeled crawler that inches through 104 kilometres of countryside, crossing specially strengthened bridges and squeezing through carefully widened roads, to Cadarache. If all goes to plan, the first coils will arrive at the ITER site in about three years' time.

Deadline implausible

Still, progress on the toroidal coils seems faster than on the second of the reactor's key magnetic arrays, the so-called poloidal field coils. The building specially built for their construction is impressively large but mostly empty, save for half a dozen crates and a circular crane that hangs from the roof like a vast yellow spider, as it has been since 2012 when New Scientist last visited.

Following mounting criticism of ITER's progress, director-general Osamu Motojima is striving to put the monumental project on "a more realistic schedule". He told New Scientist that the difficulty of integrating the parts supplied by ITER's myriad partners made the current deadline of 2020 for "first plasma" implausible; 2022 or 2023 are more likely.

Even once first plasma has been achieved, the reactor will spend years running experimentally before switching to the deuterium-tritium mix needed to generate substantial power. Motojima hopes this second milestone, scheduled for 2027, will still be achievable.

All this is taking its toll on morale. Several of the senior ITER figures I spoke to felt that ITER's politics - with member states jostling for contracts, and supposedly identical parts often made by different manufacturers on different continents - together with the technical challenges, made even Motojima's revised timeframe unworkable. They are quietly banking on 2025 or beyond. "I hope I see first plasma while I'm still on the project," says Neil Mitchell, head of ITER's magnets division.

Others are enjoying the ride. "ITER is not the first mega project: it's a great challenge, but it's also great fun," says Ken Blackler, who will have the job of fitting together the giant components inside the tightly confined wall of the reactor, Tetris-style.

The most impassioned advocate I hear from is Mark Henderson, who runs the microwave system that will help heat the plasma. He argues forcefully that fusion is the only adequate response to climate change. "Grasping the sun and bringing it to earth is greater than going to the moon and decoding DNA," he says. But he too agrees that the rate of development needs to accelerate, and the road to practical fusion power may be a long one.

Those working on ITER today may have to live in the knowledge that the fruit of their labours will be reaped by others.

Source: newscientist.com

After years of calculation, planning, component production and installation the Wendelstein 7-X project is now entering a new phase: Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) in Greifswald in May started the preparations for operation of this the world's largest fusion device of the stellarator type.

Assembly began in April 2005: A special grab hoisted the first of 70 more than man-sized magnet coils carefully over a just finger-wide slit onto a bizarrely shaped steel vessel. The coil, weighing six tons, and the vessel part were the first components of the Wendelstein 7-X fusion device to arrive at Greifswald from their production facilities throughout Europe. Here, more than 800 kilometres from the home institute at Garching in Bavaria, IPP had opened a second site in 1994 within the framework of a special programme "Aufbau Ost" to support the eastern part of Germany.

The two sites are pursuing the same objective: copying on earth the energy production of the sun. A fusion power plant is to produce energy from fusion of atomic nuclei. As the fusion fire does not ignite till a temperature of over 100 million degrees is attained, the fuel, viz. a low-density hydrogen plasma, ought not to come into contact with the cold walls. Confined by magnetic fields, the fuel is suspended inside a vacuum chamber almost without contact. The two types of configuration for the magnetic cage are being investigated by IPP at the two separate sites: the ASDEX Upgrade tokamak is being operated at Garching, the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator is being built at Greifswald.

The more simply designed tokamaks are still to the fore. Today only a tokamak such as the ITER international test reactor has the confidence to produce an energy-supplying plasma. "But", states Project Head Professor Dr. Thomas Klinger, "the stellarator principle promises strengths where its fellow campaigner shows weaknesses." Unlike tokamaks, which work in pulsed mode, stellarators are suitable for continuous operation, by virtue of their specially configured magnetic system.

Proving this makes Wendelstein 7-X the key experiment. The structure of its magnetic field is the result of sophisticated optimisation calculations made by the Stellarator Theory division and of its more than ten years of searching for a particularly stable and thermally insulating magnetic cage. Professor Klinger states: "Wendelstein 7-X is expected to put, for the first time, the quality of its plasma equilibrium and confinement on an equal footing with those of a tokamak. The experiment is to show that stellarators are also suitable for power plants." And with discharges lasting 30 minutes, it is to demonstrate its essential superiority, viz. continuous operation. This does not require Wendelstein 7-X to produce energy: Many properties of an ignited plasma can be transferred to stellarators from the ITER tokamak.

The device comprises five almost identical modules preinstalled and assembled in a circle in the experimentation hall: 70 superconducting coils strung along a steel plasma vessel are enclosed in a ring-shaped shell. In their vacuum-pumped interior the magnets are later cooled with liquid helium to superconduction temperature at nearly absolute zero. They then need hardly any energy. Besides the major components, miles of cooling ducts, current leads, measuring cables, numerous observation ports and sensors were installed, always in conjunction with control measurements and tightness testing of the many thousands of brazing seams.

"The industrial production and assembly were already an experiment in itself", states Professor Klinger, "a task that we at first underestimated: The superconduction technology coupled with the elaborate geometry of the components presented us with exacting quality requirements." In fact, construction did not take six years as planned, but nine years. Design and production, measurement and calculation – the complex shaping called for new methods that had first to be developed by the institute and industry during construction. A new basis plan was therefore drawn up in 2007. Since then assembly of Wendelstein 7-X is within schedule and the budget plan, and since 2009 – as first research project in Germany – it is even certified in accordance with industry standard ISO 9001.

Companies from the whole of Europe produced the components for Wendelstein 7-X. The investment costs met by the Federal Government, the State of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and the EU came to 370 million euros. Contracts worth more than 80 million were awarded to regional companies. Numerous research facilities at home and abroad were involved in construction of the device: Within the framework of Helmholtz Association Karlsruhe Institute of Technology was responsible for the entire microwave plasma heating, Jülich Research Centre built diagnostics and produced the elaborate connections of the superconducting magnet coils. Installation of these required 160 person-years of work time by superconduction technology specialists from the Polish Academy of Sciences in Krakow. The US fusion institutes at Princeton, Oak Ridge and Los Alamos made contributions that included auxiliary coils and measuring instruments worth 7.5 million dollars for equipping Wendelstein 7-X.

At the beginning of May the shell of the device was closed and the first pumps started up. The inauguration ceremony on 20 May 2014 will mark entry into the next work phase, viz. preparation of operation. This will involve testing all technical systems: the vacuum in the vessels, the cooling system, the superconducting coils and the magnetic field produced by them. Professor Klinger: "If all goes well, we can produce the first plasma in about a year."

Source: phys.org