L&T Heavy engineering has successfully delivered its first consignment of Cryostat, part of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) fusion reactor facility being built at Cadarache in the south of France. This is the first HEL (Heavy Exceptional Load) consignment of ITER program being dispatched to France with a total consignment weight of 460MT. Being an international collaborative project, ITER involves “in-kind” contributions from seven member entities viz., European Union, India, China, Japan, S. Korea, Russia and USA. ITER India, which is a part of the Institute for Plasma Research located at Gandhinagar, Gujarat, is the nodal agency responsible for the Indian portion of the project, which awarded L&T the contract for manufacturing the Cryostat. With a fully welded cylindrical vacuum/pressure chamber the Cryostat is designed with an overall dimension of 29.3m diameter, 29.6m height and a finished weight of 3850 metric tonnes. Built from stainless steel, its thicknesses ranges from 50mm to 250mm. The major forgings for the cryostat segment were made in India and supplied by L&T Special Steel and Heavy Forgings with NPCIL.
