L&T bags cryostat order from French nuclear project

MUMBAI: Engineering major Larsen & Toubro (L&T) today said it has bagged a contract for manufacture and installation of cryostat for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor project in France.

L&T's heavy engineering unit has bagged the contract, whose scope includes engineering, procurement, manufacture and installation of cryostat, a device used to maintain cold cryogenic temperatures of samples or devices mounted within it, the company said in a statement here.

The order, whose value was not disclosed, is expected to be executed over a period of eight years.

"L&T Heavy Engineering will manufacture and install the ITER's cryostat for the world's largest experimental thermo-nuclear fusion reactor, coming up in Cadarache, South France," it said.

The project entails building the world's largest and most advanced experimental tokamak nuclear fusion reactor. It aims to make the long-awaited transition from experimental studies of plasma physics to full-scale electricity-producing fusion power plants.

The project is funded and run by seven-member entities - European Union, India, Japan, China, Russia, South Korea and the US.

As per the contract, 54 modules of the cryostat will be dispatched by L&T Heavy Engineering from its Hazira facility in Gujarat to France, it said.

The cryostat will be a large vacuum vessel, a stainless steel structure surrounding the tokamak and super conducting magnets of ITER.

It constitutes the outermost boundary of the reactor, providing a super-cool, vacuum environment for the inner cryogenic systems and acts as a secondary confinement barrier for the reactor, the release said.