Strategy for the blanket testing in ITER

ITER is anticipated as the only step between now and the DEMO fusion reactor. One of its main objectives is to demonstrate the availability and integration of technologies essential for a fusion reactor by testing of components for a future reactor including the tritium breeding modules. Hence, a task for all the ITER Parties (EU, JA, RF) that are engaged in the blanket development, is to draw up a Testing Programme aiming at exploiting the unique features of this machine, but also to take into account its intrinsic limitations. In this paper the Testing Programme for the EU Helium Cooled Pebble Bed (HCPB) Blanket concept is presented. The test strategy is based on four different Test Blanket Modules (TBM) each devoted to a family of objectives (electromagnetics, neutronics and tritium production, thermo-mechanics and plant integration); the general external design of these modules is similar, but internals, instrumentation and operation mode will be different to cope with the specific testing objectives. These modules will be successively irradiate starting from the beginning of ITER operation; the time schedule of the tests of each module is co-ordinate with the different plasma operations (H–H phase, D–D, etc.).