Engineering Challenges for ITER

Summary form only given. The United States has joined with China, the European Union, India, Japan, the Republic of Korea, and the Russian Federation in an international collaboration to construct and operate ITER, a full-scale, 400 MW experimental fusion device. ITER will be constructed at Cadarache, France, and is expected to be completed by 2016. U.S. Contributions to ITER (U.S. ITER) is a Department of Energy Office of Science project consisting of procurement of hardware (including supporting R&D and design), assignment of personnel (U.S. engineers and scientists) to the ITER site in Cadarache, and cash contributions to the ITER Organization for the U.S. share of common expenses such as personnel, infrastructure, assembly, and installation. The US-supplied hardware includes contributions in the areas of magnets, blankets, diagnostics, tritium processing, ion cyclotron and electron cyclotron heating and current drive systems, pellet fuelling, and more conventional systems such as cooling water and electrical power systems. The large scale of ITER (~24,000 tonnes of equipment in a ~30 m diameter cryostat), the significant extrapolation from previous fusion experiments (current record fusion power ~16 MW), and the need for long pulse, high reliability operation present many engineering challenges. This paper will describe the ITER design status and some of the challenges.