Assembling testbed #2 for ITER's heating neutral beams

The ITER neutral beam injectors will be first of a kind, operating at 1MV with negative ion beams up to 40A. As part of a risk mitigation strategy, the ITER Organization is testing key system components in advance of operation at the ITER Neutral Beam Test Facility in Padua, Italy. This facility, housed at the Consorzio RFX laboratory, is the only one in the world capable of demonstrating ITER heating neutral beam requirements simultaneously.

Experiments began last year on SPIDER, a full-scale negative ion source. A second testbed will come on line in 2022: MITICA, a full-scale prototype 1 MV injector that will allow scientists to test and optimize the beam source, accelerator, and beamline components.

Work is progressing on the assembly of the MITICA test bed now. Acceptance tests have been run on the high voltage power sources supplied by Europe and Japan (see this page for photos) and, recently, Europe delivered the vacuum chamber that will house the MITICA beam source (photo).

The 5-metre-tall, 67-tonne chamber was manufactured by De Pretto Industrie (Italy) under a contract signed with the European Domestic Agency Fusion for Energy.