Guidelines for remote handling maintenance of ITER neutral beam line components: Proposal of an alternate supporting system

Remote handling (R/H) maintenance of ITER components is one of the main challenges of the ITER project. This type of maintenance shall be operational for the assembly and nuclear phase of exploitation of ITER. It must be considered at a very early stage since it significantly impacts on the components design, interfaces management, assembly, maintenance and integration aspects. A large part of the R/H equipment will be procured by the EU Participating Team, including the whole Neutral Beam R/H Equipment. The Neutral Beam Heating & Current Drive system (NB&CD) design is being revisited by the ITER project. A vertical maintenance scheme is presently considered which may significantly impact on the reference design and associated components and lead to a new design of the NB&CD vacuum tank. In addition, NB line components remote handling solutions are being studied. The neutral beam test facility ITER to be built in Europe in the near future is also based on the vertical NB maintenance scheme of beam line components. New design guidelines compliant for both the ITER NB&CD system and the NB test facility proposed by the CEA association are described in the paper. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.