Development of pipe welding, cutting and inspection tools for the ITER blanket

In D-T burning reactors such as International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), an internal access welding/cutting of blanket cooling pipe with bend sections is inevitably required because of spatial constraint due to nuclear shield and available port opening space. For this purpose, internal access pipe welding/cutting/inspection tools for manifolds and branch pipes are being developed according to the agreement of the ITER R and D task (T329). A design concept of welding/cutting processing head with a flexible optical fiber has been developed and the basic feasibility studies on welding, cutting and rewelding are performed using stainless steel plate (SS316L). In the same way, a design concept of inspection head with a non-destructive inspection probe (including a leak-testing probe) has been developed and the basic characteristic tests are performed using welded stainless steel pipes. In this report, the details of welding/cutting/inspection heads for manifolds and branch pipes are described, together with the basic experiment results relating to the welding/cutting and inspection. In addition, details of a composite type optical fiber, which can transmit both the high-power YAG laser and visible rays, is described. (author)