Contribution to DEMO reactor RH maintenance assessment

The scope of this paper is a preliminary assessment of the maintenance scheme in support of the European study for the next generation of fusion reactor: DEMO. Despite other fusion machine requiring remote handling maintenance operations, DEMO is supposed to work under steady state operational conditions. Therefore, requirement on the maintenance scheme is stronger. To target a good availability of the machine along machine operation plan, it is necessary to draw an adequate maintenance scheme. Indeed, due to the high fluxes generated by the plasma in the vacuum vessel, the first wall lifetime is limited, so the frequent replacement is necessary. On current fusion experimental machine, as first wall load conditions are less severe, DEMO condition implies high level of requirement on maintenance time. During DEMO lifetime, several full first wall replacements are expected. To provide access to the vacuum vessel machine for first wall removal, preparatory work is required to set the machine to adequate maintenance conditions and to open the machine properly, the same situation at the end of the maintenance period. Shutdown duration for first wall replacement should be as short as possible to reach the availability target of the machine. From this statement, the maintenance duration should not exceed 20% of the total lifetime of the reactor operation. First wall segmentation (i.e. total number of component to replace) has a high impact onto the replacement time. Considering the number of feasible designs for the first wall segmentation, we concentrate remote handling concept assessments one type of segmentation, the one minimizing the numbers of modules to replace . Assumption on Divertor segmentation for these DEMO studies have similarities with Divertor ITER design; therefore ITER design output is relevant . We assume divertor removal performed in shadow time, while removing the other first wall modules.