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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Deep geologic repository progress—2025 Update
Editor's note: This article has was originally published in November 2023. It has been updated with new information as of June 2025.
Outside my office, there is a display case filled with rock samples from all over the world. It contains a disk of translucent, orange salt from the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.; a core of white-and-bronze gneiss from the site of the future deep geologic repository in Eurajoki, Finland; several angular chunks of fine-grained, gray claystone from the underground research laboratory at Bure, France; and a piece of coarse-grained granite from the underground research tunnel in Daejeon, South Korea.
Lijun Cai, Kun Lu, Yong Lu, Chunlin Lai, Junsong Shen, Dequan Liu, Jianghua Wei, Jian Liu, Yongqi Gu, Tao Lin, Mingxuan Lu, Yuxiang Liu, CFETR Integration Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 78 | Number 8 | November 2022 | Pages 631-639
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2022.2100306
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The major radius of the China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR) is 7.2 m, and its minor radius is 2.2 m, which are larger than those of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). That makes the assembly of the CFETR machine more intricate and challenging due to the assembly tool design, and their stresses are more complex when the weight of key parts/components increases, especially the assembly of the cryostat vessel, the vacuum vessel (VV), the toroidal field (TF) magnets, the poloidal field (PF) magnets, and the thermal shielding (TS). Based on the characteristics of the CFETR machine, a 45-deg assembly sector (with eight sectors in total), containing one 45-deg VV sector, two TF magnets, and one 45-deg VV TS, was designed as an assembly unit together with its assembly tooling. To improve the assembly efficiency, three working regions along the toroidal direction of the CFETR machine were designed to operate simultaneously. In addition, the assembly tools of the PF magnets and the cryostat were considered, and all of them are capable of supporting and adjusting the large CFETR machine components. Meanwhile, to improve their assembly accuracy and measurement efficiency, a laser tracker, an indoor global positioning system, and a scanner were employed in their assembly process. In addition, a metrology network was built for assembly of the CFETR machine.