Westinghouse Electric Company has signed a $180m contract for the assembly of the vacuum vessel for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), under construction in France. Westinghouse will be responsible for simultaneously welding together the nine vacuum vessel sectors to form a single, circular ring-shaped chamber (also known as a torus). Each of the nine steel sectors weighs approximately 440 tonnes.
Europe’s Fusion for Energy (F4E) consortium is delivering five of the sectors and South Korea the remaining four. To date six of the sectors are on site in Cadarache.
Westinghouse has collaborated with ITER for over a decade and has played a key role in the manufacturing of key parts for ITER vacuum vessel, including the five F4E vacuum vessel sectors in cooperation with Ansaldo Nucleare and Walter Tosto. Westinghouse’s participation involved developing advanced fabrication techniques.
The company plans to deploy specialised robotic “snake” welding heads developed with ENSA. However, these systems have only demonstrated approximately 15 metres of production welds to date. The ITER vessel will require more than 100 metres of welding to meet specifications.
