Overview of the ITER Tokamak complex building and integration of plant systems toward construction

During the last two years, one of the main ITER challenges was to improve the maturity of the plant systems layout in order to confirm their integration in the building final design and freeze the interface definitions in-between the systems and to the buildings. The propagation of safety requirements in the design of the nuclear building like confinement, fire zoning and radiation shielding is of first priority. A major effort was placed by ITER Organization together with the European Domestic Agency (F4E) and the Architect Engineer as a joint team to fix the interfaces and the loading conditions to buildings. The most demanding systems in terms of interface definition are water cooling, cryogenic, detritiation, vacuum, cable trays and building services. All penetrations through the walls for piping, cables and other equipment have been defined, as well as all temporary openings needed for the installation phase. Project change requests (PCR) impacting the Tokamak complex buildings have been implemented in a tight allocated time schedule. The most demanding change was to implement a new design of the Tokamak basic machine supporting system. The 18 supporting columns of the cryostat (2001 baseline) were replaced at the end of 2012 by a concrete crown and radial concrete ribs linked to the basemat and to the bioshield surrounding the Tokamak. The change was implemented successfully in the building construction design to allow basemat construction phase being performed at mid-2014. The paper gives an overview of the final configuration of the ITER nuclear buildings and highlights the large progress made on the final integration of the plant systems in the Tokamak complex. The revised design of the Tokamak machine supporting system is also described.