Cool heating

The Procurement Arrangement for the transmission lines that will deliver radio-frequency (RF) power from the power sources to the antennas and into the plasma was signed by ITER Director-General Kaname Ikeda this week.

US ITER is in charge of procuring this feature of ITER's heating and current drive system. The contract is now on its way to the US where Ned Sauthoff, head of the US ITER Project Office, will countersign the document. A total of 20 MW of RF power will be initially available from the system. "The power is not the challenge here," explained Bertrand Beaumont, Radio Frequency Section Leader who was in charge of building the RF system for Tore Supra. "The challenge is the duration that this power needs to be delivered." Making the designed 20 MW available for pulse durations of one hour—compared with minutes on Tore Supra or seconds on JET—requires active cooling. So ITER will once more push the frontier of science beyond current limitations.