Iter decommissioning to be studied

Tuesday, 29 November 2016

A consortium led by Amec Foster Wheeler has been awarded a contract to examine the future decommissioning of the Iter fusion reactor, currently under construction at Cadarache in the south of France.

The Iter tokamak will contain an estimated one million parts (Image: Iter Organisation)

 

Amec Foster Wheeler, with EAI Ingénierie and NUKEM Technologies Engineering Services, will carry out the 12-month study into the duration, sequencing and cost for dismantling the Iter machine, once it comes to the end of its projected operating period in 2042.

The contract is one of several awarded to Amec Foster Wheeler related to the project. In June this year, the Momentum consortium - led by Amec Foster Wheeler - signed a €174 million ($184 million) contract to manage and coordinate the assembly and installation of more than one million components for the Iter reactor over the next ten years. And last year, it won a €70 million seven-year robotics contract to develop the remote handling system for Iter's neutral beam cell.

In addition, alongside the contract for the Iter decommissioning study, Amec Foster Wheeler has been awarded two further contracts: to prepare a design work plan and data for a decontamination program; and to carry out conceptual design and engineering for a remote waste cutting and packaging system.

Additional contracts

 

Also, under an existing framework contract, the Iter Organisation has appointed Amec Foster Wheeler to design a remotely operated rail and trolley system for maintenance and inspection of the cryostat, a part of the Iter machine that will contain key components including the vacuum vessel and tokamak.

In addition to the above, Fusion For Energy, which manages Europe's contribution to Iter, has appointed Amec Foster Wheeler to a new single source multi-year framework contract to provide technical specifications, contract follow-up and acceptance work on nuclear safety electronic controls and instrumentation systems.

Greg Willetts, consultancy vice president of Amec Foster Wheeler's Clean Energy business, said: "These contract wins underline our leading expertise in conceptual design, engineering, technical specifications, remote handling and planning for decommissioning."

Iter project

 

Iter (which stands for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) is a major international project to build a 500MWt tokamak fusion device (requiring an input of 300MWe) designed to prove the feasibility of fusion as a large-scale and carbon-free source of energy. The European Union is contributing almost half of the cost of its construction, while the other six members (China, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the USA) are contributing equally to the rest. Under a revised schedule established by the Iter organisation this year, first plasma is planned for 2025, with deuterium-tritium fusion experiments commencing in 2035. Construction costs are currently expected to come to around €20 billion, with components being contributed by the Iter members on an 'in-kind' basis.

The Iter organization took responsibility and possession of the Iter site from the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) in July 2010. The site is due to be returned to the CEA at the end of the duration of the Iter agreement, in October 2042.

Researched and written
by World Nuclear News