(150c) The Environmental Impact of the Cooling Water System of the Iter Reactor

ITER is the largest fusion experimental reactor in the world designed to reach the first plasma at mid of 2018. ITER is designed to demonstrate the technological feasibility of the nuclear fusion energy conversion, at plant scale, from high temperature Deuterium-Tritium plasma using the TOKAMAK magnetic confinement arrangement and with a power amplification at least of 10.

The ITER design experience, the effort in developing the leading-edge technologies and the knowhow acquired during its operation will guide the realization a proper long-term R&D fusion programme. ITER will bridge the Nuclear Fusion toward the large scale commercial production of electricity at competitive cost with other sources by 2045.

ITER is provided with a Cooling Water System (CWS) designed to rejects to the environment all the heats generated from the components (nuclear and non nuclear) using water as coolant in Primary Heat Transfer Systems (PHTSs). The only exception is the Vacuum Vessel (VV) whose heat is released, via a separate heat transfer system, to the air coolers. The total heat to be released to the environment during the DT pulse is about 1270 MW by water via the Heat Rejection System (HRS) and Cooling Tower System (CTS) plus about 13 MW mainly from the VV (10 MW) and other systems (3 MW) by air coolers.

Among others, one of the main critical issues of the ITER reactor is the minimization of the releases of all the gaseous, liquid and solid effluents from the PHTSs to the environment.

This paper describes these main releases from the CWS (PHTSs, HRS and CTS), both during normal operations and main periodical maintenance.