Status of ITER Conductor Development and Production

Abstract

The ITER magnet coils are wound from Cable-In-Conduit Conductors (CICC) 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 conductors for the Toroidal Field (TF) and Central Solenoid (CS) coils require about 500 tons of Nb <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</sub> Sn strands while the Poloidal Field (PF) and Correction Coil (CC) conductors need around 250 tons of Nb-Ti strands. The required amount of Nb <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</sub> Sn strands far exceeds pre-existing industrial capacity and calls for a significant worldwide production scale up. After explaining the in-kind procurement sharing of the various conductor types among the six ITER Domestic Agencies (DA) involved: China, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Russia, and the United States, we detail the technical requirements defined by the ITER International Fusion Energy Organization (IO), and we present a brief status of ongoing productions. The most advanced production is that for the TF conductors, where all six DAs have qualified suppliers and about 50% of the required strands have been produced and registered into the web-based conductor database developed by the IO.