One of the areas that The Fusion Report has regularly covered is the supply chain for fusion energy machines. A big example of how big the supply chain for fusion energy could be (and yes, I did say “big” twice) is the recent contract signed between the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) and Westinghouse Electric Company. The contract is to build the vacuum vessel that will maintain the vacuum within the ITER fusion machine. The vessel, which is a hermetically-sealed, double-wall enclosure, will be assembled onsite at ITER from nine (9) sections that will be built at Westinghouse. The total value of the contract is $180M, was led by Westinghouse with help from Ansaldo Nucleare and Walter Tosto, all three of them members of the European Union (EU) Fusion for Energy (F4E) consortium.

“ITER is pleased to have Westinghouse Electric Company taking on this significant role in our first-of-a-kind project,” said Pietro Barabaschi, ITER Director-General. “With decades of leadership in nuclear power plant design and construction, we are confident that Westinghouse will be able to apply its remarkable expertise to the assembly of the ITER Tokamak.”

Just How Big is The ITER Vacuum Vessel?

Needless to say, the vacuum vessel for ITER is huge! Here are some specifics:

• Outer diameter: 19.4 meters
• Outer height: 11.4 meters
• Interior volume: 1,400 cubic meters
• Weight: 5,200 metric tons
• Weight including thermal blanket, divertors: 8,500 metric tons

This is not your typical Thermos bottle! When completed and fully energized, it will enclose a plasma with a volume of 840 cubic meters. Each of the nine (9) sections of the vacuum vessel weighs nearly 600 metric tons. For comparison, the Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) SPARC machine (in total) weighs less than 1,000 metric tons, with the diameter of the cryostat base being less than 8 meters. Cost-wise, the entire SPARC reactor was estimated to have a cost of $400 million, while the cost of ITER’s vacuum vessel alone is $180 million.

What Does This Agreement Mean for the Fusion Energy Commercial Supply Chain?

It would be easy to read into this announcement that it heralds the entry of big industrial companies (in this case, a nuclear systems company, BTW) into the fusion energy ecosystem, but that would probably be incorrect. It is not unusual for large multinational corporations to work on large government programs such as ITER with large budgets and timelines.

On the positive side, it is good to see that a company usually known for the development of nuclear fission reactors is helping build the world’s largest fusion system. There is a lot of knowledge and experience around neutron hardening that Westinghouse can apply to the development of fusion machines – this is one of the areas where fusion and nuclear fission can have some mutually beneficial interactions. While there may not be a lot of these opportunities, this is definitely one of them.

Summary: Expanding the Supply Chain is a Good Thing

One of the biggest risks in the development of commercial fusion, especially for smaller companies that cannot be fully vertically integrated, is a weak or incomplete supply chain. Material science is definitely one of those areas; However, there are a number of other areas, like high-temperature superconductors (HTS), high-voltage/high-power capacitors, pulsed energy systems, thermal blankets, fuel injection systems, and high-vacuum pumps that have some level of commonality. For these challenges, consortiums and/or jointly funded development activities have a lot of promise. After all, ITER is a project that is jointly funded by the world’s nations – doing the same thing in commercial fusion for subsystems everyone needs should also be possible.