The largest component of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), the cryostat, has been delivered to the construction site in the French city of Cadarache.
The contract for the custom-built cryostat for the ITER Magnet Cold test unit was signed in December 2023 with a Chinese consortium including the Institute of Plasma Physics, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ASIPP) and the Shanghai Nuclear Power Equipment Company (SENPEC). It arrived at the construction site after a 104 km road trip from the port of Berre-l’Etang, in the Marseille area.
The 330-tonne cryostat is 22 metres long, almost 11 metres wide. A transport installation with a capacity of about 600 kilowatts was used to transport it. The journey took five days, travelling only between the hours of 10.30pm and the early hours of the morning. Due to its exceptional dimensions and the challenge of negotiating the many curves along the 100-kilometre ITER itinerary, the journey was completed at walking speed.
The cryostat for ITER’s magnet cold test facility will house some of the D-shaped toroidal field coils as well as the smallest of the ring-shaped poloidal field coils (PF1). It has a total volume of 1,400 cubic metres.
Passing through villages was one of the most challenging parts of the transport operation. Street lamps, road signs, and bus stop structures had to be temporarily dismantled prior to the convoy’s passage, and reinstalled immediately afterwards.
The 104-kilometre-long itinerary from the port to the site has been sized to accommodate the largest of the machine’s components. In 2018, a change in the transport strategy for PF6 (the second-smallest of the six poloidal field coils) had required that a narrow passage between two small cliffs, located between the Bridge of Mirabeau and the ITER site, had to be enlarged to allow the passage in June 2020 of the 10-metre-wide component.
While the latest convoy carried an even wider load, precise measurements by DAHER transport experts determined that because the magnet test facility cryostat sat higher on the transport trailer getting through the gap in the cliffs would not be an issue. The component is now stored in the former Cryostat Workshop on site, where it will be equipped with reflective “super insulation” prior to its transfer to the magnet cold test facility where systems commissioning is ongoing. The first elements of the facility are now connected to the cryoplant.
