Traditionally, remote maintenance in fusion and other nuclear plants has made use of man-in-the-loop telemanipulator devices in order to deal with the relatively unpredictable nature of tasks, and complex environments. Future fusion devices will require maintenance orders of magnitude more complex than at present, however it is infeasible to scale remote maintenance operations teams linearly...
The containment vessel of the Joint European Torus is a huge, complicated assembly with a myriad of components, all of which are important for plasma operation. As a research device, JET has been operated over many years and has been extensively rebuilt. During each maintenance shutdown, inspections and measurements of the Vacuum Vessel are carried out by means of dual-camera Stereo surveys,...
The divertor configuration defines the power exhaust capabilities of DEMO as one of the major key design parameters and sets a number of requirements on the tokamak layout, including port sizes, PF coil positions, and size of TF coils. It also requires a corresponding configuration of plasma-facing components and a remote handling scheme to be able to handle the cassettes and associated...
The ITER machine consists of a large number of highly integrated and complex systems, with critical functional positional requirements (e.g. accurate positioning of magnets to minimize error fields and location of plasma facing components with respect to magnetic axis) and reduced design clearances to maximize Tokamak performances and limit costs. Deviations from specified part tolerances and...
ITER-RH system is used to exchange the divertor’s 54 cassette assemblies in the vessel. Water hydraulics and servo valves are currently used in the task requiring high accuracy tracking and the use of de-mineralized water. The main concern has been robustness of the technology. Only few suitable commercial water servo valves exist and problems e.g. with jamming and wear been encountered. A...
Monitoring the fuel content of plasma-facing components is a key challenge for fusion devices like Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) [1], equipped with graphite PFCs or ITER with beryllium/tungsten components. In the case of ITER, it is essential to limit the tritium content in the first wall to comply with safety regulations and to sustain the tritium cycle. In W7-X the measurement and control of the...
Tungsten is the main candidate material for the first wall (FW) armour of future fusion reactors. However, a loss of coolant accident with simultaneous air ingress into the vacuum vessel would lead to temperatures of the in-vessel components exceeding 1000ºC, resulting in the formation of volatile and radioactive tungsten oxides. A way to prevent this important safety concern is the addition...
