SST-1status & plans

Steady State Tokamak (SST-1) is currently being refurbished in a mission mode at the Institute for Plasma Research with an ultimate objective of producing the first plasma in early 2012. Since Jan 2009, under the SST-1 Mission mandate, a broad spectrum of refurbishment activities have been initiated and pursued on several subsystems of SST-1. Developing sub nano-ohm leak tight joints in the magnet winding packs, developing single phased LN2 cooled thermal shields, developing supercritical helium cooled 5 K thermal shields for magnet cases, insurance of thermal and electrical isolations between various sub-systems of SST-1, testing of each of the SST-1 Toroidal Field (TF) magnets in cold with nominal currents, testing each of the modules and octants of SST-1 machine shell in representative experimentally simulated scenarios, augmentation and reliability establishment of the SST-1 vacuum vessel baking system, time synchronizations amongst various heterogeneous subsystems of SST-1, large data storage scenarios, integrated engineering testing of the first phase of the plasma diagnostics etc are some of the major refurbishment activities. Presently, the SST-1 device integration is in full swing. The cold test of the assembled SST-1 TF and PF magnets are due to begin from Dec 2011. Following the successful testing of the SST-1 superconducting magnet system and engineering validations of the machine shell, the first plasmas will be attempted in SST-1. The first plasma will be ~ 100 kA limiter assisted with the available volt-sec and could possibly be assisted by ECCD/LHCD.