Chinese Consortium has got the order of ITER Tokamak Assembly which is officially called Contract TAC-1, as the ITER official announced the result in this June.

The Consortium is formed by Institute of Plasma Physics, Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (or ASIPP, CASHIPS), China Nuclear Power Engineering, China Nuclear Industry 23 Construction Co., Ltd., Southwestern Institute of Physics, and Framatome. With the leadership of LUO Delong, director-general of China’s International Nuclear Fusion Energy Program Execution Center as well as the enormous work of the Consortium for the past two years, the Chinese Consortium has won the competitive bidding.

International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor Project (or ITER) is one of the most ambitious energy projects in the world with 35 nations collaborating to build the world's largest tokamak. It has seven Members—China, the European Union, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and the United States—being engaged in a 35-year collaboration to build and operate the ITER experimental device.

Now the giant machine has come to the point where the core part of ITER Tokamak is waiting to be assembled.

TAC-1 is core part for the ITER Tokamak. And complexity of the part itself makes the assembly extremely complicated.

The assembly is composed of several main subtasks, for instance, the assembly of Superconducting Magnet system, Magnet Feeder system, Cryostat, Cold shield and Diagnostics etc. It means there will be tens of thousands of components are going to be assembled on-site. To assure the successful operation of such a complicated machine, the assemble of its core part must achieve extremely high accuracy which leads it to not an easy work.

ASIPP has constructed and operates the EAST Tokamak, through which the EAST team of ASIPP has carried out intensive and extensive research related to nuclear fusion. Enduring hard work for several decades brings the team scientific and technical achievements and of course wins them the worldwide reputation.

According to ASIPP, the TAC-1 assembly is the largest order they have ever got. In addition to TAC-1, they have received design and assembly orders from other scientific mega-facility, for instance the NICA in Russia, ASDEX-UPGRADE in Germany and WEST in France etc.

Contact:

ZHOU Shu

Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (http://english.hf.cas.cn/)

Email: zhous@hfcas.ac.cn