Assystem : Industry and Technology Consulting Award

The ENGAGE consortium has been providing all-trades assistance to the project owner and project manager for the construction of the entire site since 2011, and will continue until 2018. Their joint efforts have now been rewarded by the prestigious Industry and Technology Consulting Award as part of France's 2017 National Engineering Grand Prix.

Global collaboration to test nuclear fusion

The ITER project involves recreating on Earth - in a controlled way - the fusion reaction of hydrogen atoms as it would occur in the heart of the sun and stars. The purpose of this programme was to demonstrate the scientific and technical feasibility of this process. Fusion research could represent a sustainable alternative to all current modes of energy production, by developing a safe, inexhaustible and environmentally-friendly source of energy.

ITER is both the largest experimental fusion facility ever built and the first global collaboration of its kind. Europe's contribution represents almost half of the cost of building the machine; the other six members involved in this international collaboration (China, Japan, India, the Republic of Korea, the Russian Federation and the United States) contribute equally to the remaining funding.

An outstanding project raising major challenges

ENGAGE is constantly striving for creatively deal with the challenge posed by the complexity of the ITER project. In addition to the technical challenges of this project, the size of the operation and the level of safety and reliability designed to meet the highest standards, have prompted the consortium to develop creative expertise in every aspect of its engineering mission.

The programme entails building the infrastructure of the half-hectare platform, constructed by the European agency F4E (Fusion for Energy) comprising some 40 industrial buildings, as well as two nuclear buildings: one housing the Tokamak (a 30-metre high experimental reactor weighing 25,000 metric tons), and the other a plant for preparing and reprocessing tritium, a hydrogen isotope.

These buildings will need to house a very large amount of equipment and processes; they also have to be dimensioned to withstand a whole series of accident scenarios including earthquakes, leakage of the cooling circuit, loss of vacuum in the Tokamak enclosure, and more. The programme therefore vitally involves meeting numerous safety requirements (approximately 300 for fit-for-purpose nuclear buildings).

In addition, nuclear fusion combines energy production with sustainable development (the absence of highly radioactive waste, inexhaustible fuel, and the capacity to immediately stop the reaction in an emergency). Faced with such a challenge, the design and construction had to integrate sustainable development as a key design input to the project, based on preserving the environment, fostering social cohesion, and promoting a responsible economy.

The first structures are now rising from the ground

The project is currently in the phase of infrastructure and building construction. Three floors (out of eight) have already been completed in the central Tokamak building. Four auxiliary buildings are enclosed and covered, and interior work is starting there. The other auxiliary buildings are in their structural phase.

As for the infrastructure, the first very high-voltage (400 kV) substation has been delivered. Some of the upgraded areas of the platform will soon be delivered to ITER ready for the arrival of the process assembly companies.

In all, about 1,800 people are working on this highly complex and dense construction site, constantly meeting strict deadlines and high-level quality and safety requirements.

A full range of technologies and innovations

The essential originality of the project is the '3D as master' digital model which ENGAGE oversees and manages for the building part, in order to guarantee that the building and process concepts converge, configure the input data, identify and resolve interfaces, and control any modifications.

The management of the building's nuclear safety requirements has been developed by ENGAGE on a database so as to allow the traceability of the requirements, their versions and the, way they have been addressed by the different designers and builders.

The configuration management of all the participants also required the implementation of a dedicated database to deal with the very large volume of modifications (one per day on average), of very variable sizes, which permanently impact the design and construction conditions.

ENGAGE has set up a database for all project stakeholders, which guarantees that the documents are used reliably, in terms of registration, traceability, dissemination and evolution. Given the considerable volume of information and requests (1.87 TB of stored documents, 70,000 monthly connections, 10,000 documents published monthly), ENGAGE has contributed to the development of version 4 of the SGTI (Egis solution for collaborative management of building projects) and set up the special-use processes and efficient validation circuits that this requires. (more information at: www.sgti4.fr )

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