Finland to produce service robot for future experimental fusion reactor

Protoype of robot system servicing fusion reactor introduced in Tampere

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The world’s first functioning, electricity-producing fusion reactor is still decades away, but already one can practice with and test one of the reactor’s most critical parts at the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland facility in Tampere.
      The fusion reactor’s service robot was introduced for testing and training purposes on Thursday.
      The occasion attracted to Tampere a commendable number of media representatives from different parts of Europe. This is possibly because even according to the several experts who gave speeches at the ceremony, the project in question - producing clean energy - is mankind’s most significant undertaking ever.
     
Inside a VTT hall, the guests were shown a 65-ton steel structure, roughly size of a bus, consisting of rails along which the actual robot with its robotic arm will move into the hot core of the reactor. The scale of the prototype is 1:1.
      The remote-operated robot’s function is to replace special cassettes or nine-tonne reactor components in the core, the purpose of which is to protect the reactor’s other parts from excessive heat.
      The cassettes work in the same fashion as the thermal protection tiles on a space shuttle, which absorb heat on the craft's return into the atmosphere. When the service life is up they are replaced.
      The space shuttle was further mentioned in connection with a statement according to which the fusion reactor is an even more demanding operating environment.
      The requirements for the equipment include, among other things, that they can be used to control the fusion plasma, which in the nuclear reaction reaches temperatures of up to a hundred million degrees Celsius.
      In time the robot’s more advanced version may be seen in Cadarache in the South of France, in the ITER experimental reactor, which at the moment is still a mere construction site.
     
”If the fusion reactor were an internal combustion engine on a car, then the service robot complex, or divertor, would be its exhaust manifold, and its beginning section to be even more precise”, says VTT Chief Research Scientist Seppo Karttunen. The task is anything but easy, “a bit like being under a welding blowpipe”, Karttunen describes.
      The removed matter is helium, the end result of the fusion reaction, where four hydrogen nuclei are converted into a single helium nucleus. In the process 26 MeV of energy is released with no radioactive isotopes to deal with afterwards.
     
But a functioning fusion reactor is still a long way away.
      “A facility that would actually produce energy might be completed in the late 2030s. That is the most optimistic prediction”, Karttunen says.
      While waiting for that, VTT can look into ITER remote service systems and develop applications for them for other industries as well.


Links:
  ITER (Wikipedia)
  VTT

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