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Godzilla is helping ITER prepare for tokamak assembly
ITER employees stand by Godzilla, the most powerful commercially available industrial robot available. (Photo: ITER)
Many people are familiar with Godzilla as a giant reptilian monster that emerged from the sea off the coast of Japan, the product of radioactive contamination. These days, there is a new Godzilla, but it has a positive—and entirely fact-based—association with nuclear energy. This one has emerged inside the Tokamak Assembly Preparation Building of ITER in southern France.
Standing about four meters tall, with an arm that extends out to five meters, this particular Godzilla is the most powerful industrial robot that has ever been made. ITER is using it as a platform to develop and integrate technologies that will be used by other robots to install 20,000 components inside the vacuum vessel, or plasma chamber, of the tokamak under assembly at the facility. ITER’s current timeline anticipates full magnetic energy in 2036 and the start of deuterium-tritium operations in 2039.
Abdalla Abou-Jaoude (INL), Derek Gaston (INL), Guillaume Giudicelli (INL), Bo Feng (ANL), Cody Permann (INL)
Transactions | Volume 125 | Number 1 | December 2021 | Pages 914-917
