The divertor remote maintenance project

Remote replacement of the ITER divertor will be required several times during the life of ITER. To facilitate its regular exchange, the divertor is assembled in the ITER vacuum vessel from 60 cassettes. Radial movers transport each cassette along radial rails through the handling ports and into the vessel where a toroidal mover lifts and transports the cassette around a pair of toroidal rails. Once at its final position the cassette is locked to the toroidal rails and is accurately aligned in both poloidal and toroidal directions. A further requirement on the divertor is to minimise the amount of activated waste to be sent to a repository. To this end the cassettes have been designed to allow the remote replacement, in a hot cell, of their plasma facing components. The paper describes the two facilities built at ENEA Brasimone, Italy, whose aim is to demonstrate the reliable remote maintenance of the divertor cassettes. (author)