Subscribe options

Select your newsletters:

Please enter your email address:

@

Your email address will only be used for the purpose of sending you the ITER Organization publication(s) that you have requested. ITER Organization will not transfer your email address or other personal data to any other party or use it for commercial purposes.

If you change your mind, you can easily unsubscribe by clicking the unsubscribe option at the bottom of an email you've received from ITER Organization.

For more information, see our Privacy policy.

News & Media

Latest ITER Newsline

  • Test facility | How do electronics react to magnetic fields?

    A tokamak is basically a magnetic cage designed to confine, shape and control the super-hot plasmas that make fusion reactions possible. Inside the ITER Tokamak [...]

    Read more

  • ITER Robots | No two alike

    More than 500 students took part in the latest ITER Robots challenge. Working from the same instructions and technical specifications, they had worked in teams [...]

    Read more

  • Data archiving | Operating in quasi real time

    To accommodate the first real-time system integrated with the ITER control system, new components of the data archiving system have been deployed. Data archivi [...]

    Read more

  • Repairs | Setting the stage for a critical task

    Like in a game of musical chairs—albeit in slow motion and at a massive scale—components in the Assembly Hall are being transferred from one location to another [...]

    Read more

  • Image of the week | There is life on Planet ITER

    Dated April 2023, this new image of the ITER "planet" places the construction site squarely in the middle. One kilometre long, 400 metres wide, the IT [...]

    Read more

Of Interest

See archived entries

ITER NEWSLINE -

Evacuate and dissipate

If ITER were an industrial fusion plant, the better part of the heat generated by the burning plasmas would be used to produce pressurized steam and (by way of turbines and generators) electricity. Only residual heat would need to be dissipated.

Work is ongoing on one of the ''final links'' of the cooling water system: a vast (6,000 m²) zone that accommodates two large basins and a cooling tower installation made of 10 independent cells. Fabrication of the cooling tower elements has begun in India. (Click to view larger version...)
Work is ongoing on one of the ''final links'' of the cooling water system: a vast (6,000 m²) zone that accommodates two large basins and a cooling tower installation made of 10 independent cells. Fabrication of the cooling tower elements has begun in India.
But as an experimental installation, not designed to produce electricity, ITER will need to evacuate and dissipate all the power the fusion reaction generates.

And this means a lot. During the plasma burn phase, the amount of heat to be evacuated from the Tokamak and its auxiliary systems will be in the range of 1100 MW.

The complex system of piping, pumps, open and closed loops that form the ITER cooling water system ends up here, in a 6,000 m² area that accommodates cold and hot basins with a total volume of 20,000 m³ as well as an induced-draft cooling tower installation located above the cold basin.

Seen from above, the cooling water zone at the northeast end of the ITER site. (Click to view larger version...)
Seen from above, the cooling water zone at the northeast end of the ITER site.
These supersize pipes (one metre and more in diameter) for the heat rejection system are designed for a flow rate of two cubic metres per second. (Click to view larger version...)
These supersize pipes (one metre and more in diameter) for the heat rejection system are designed for a flow rate of two cubic metres per second.

return to the latest published articles