Status of ITER conductor development and production

Devred, A.*; Backbier, I.*; Bessette, D.*; Bevillard, G.*; Gardner, M.*; Jewell, M.*; Mitchell, N.*; Pong, I.*; Vostner, A.*

IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity, 22(3), p.4804909_1 - 4804909_9, 2012/06

https://doi.org/10.1109/TASC.2012.2182980

The ITER magnet system is made up of 4 sets of coils: 18 Toroidal Field (TF) coils, 6 Poloidal Field (PF) coils, 6 Central Solenoid (CS) coils and 9 pairs of Correction Coils (CC's). All of them are wound from Cable-In-Conduit Conductors (CICC's) made up of superconducting and copper strands assembled into a multistage, rope-type cable inserted into a conduit of butt-welded austenitic steel tubes. The TF and CS conductors call for about 500 tons of NbSn strands while the PF and CC conductors need around 250 tons of NbTi strands. The required amount of NbSn strands far exceeds pre-existing industrial capacity and calls for a significant worldwide production scale up. After recalling the technical requirements defined by the ITER Internal Organization (IO), we detail the in-kind procurement sharing of the various conductor types among the 6 ITER Domestic Agencies (DA's) involved: China, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Russia, and the United States, and we present a status of ongoing productions. The most advanced production is that for the TF coils, where all 6 DAs have qualified suppliers and have already registered more than 30% of the expected production data into the web-based ITER Conductor Database developed by the IO.