US engineer Jacobs has been picked to design and deliver the first-plasma radiological environmental monitoring system, which will be vital to safeguarding the health of workers at the ITER fusion experiment in southern France.
The aim is to protect them against ionizing radiation that may be emitted by the torus containing the fusing plasma when the experiment is begun.
Fusion for Energy (F4E), the organisation responsible for the EU’s contribution to ITER, estimates that the contract for designing and installing the security system will be worth $4.2m.
F4E has also renewed its contract with Jacobs as its principal supplier of instrumentation and control systems over the next seven years. Jacobs will prepare technical specifications and support F4E for a fee of $10.6m.
Karen Wiemelt, a senior vice president at the Texan engineer, commented: “We will leverage Jacobs’ leading edge technical and project integration capabilities to deliver this technically complex project.
“We aim to bring together the best equipment suppliers from across Europe, to deliver a robust integrated system to support ITER’s first plasma radiological monitoring system, and to lay the foundation for subsequent phases of work to support future fusion power operations.”
Jacobs previously delivered the REMS preliminary design under a separate contract. The new project will be carried out at the ITER site and at Jacobs’ offices across Europe.
ITER is an international experiment involving 35 countries that aims to prove the viability of fusion energy by building the world’s largest torus at St-Paul-lès-Durance, France, and demonstrating that it can produce more energy than is needed to power its plasma.
Image: Work under way on the fusion experiment (ITER Organisation/EJF Riche)
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