Overview of the preliminary remote handling handbook for IFMIF

Over the past ten years the major efforts of the scientific community involved in the development of the International Fusion Irradiation Facility (IFMIF) have been concentrated on the design of its overall systems and subsystems as well as on experimental activities carried out through various R&D programs. Among them, maintenance and refurbishment operations of components with very high activity were considered as one very challenging part of the project. It is now well recognized that taking into account Remote Handling (RH) as the main maintenance tool in controlled areas since the inception of a project, reduces the difficulty of the maintenance tasks and increase the overall reliability of the maintenance procedures. JET and ITER are the best examples. Up to now, IFMIF R&D programs in RH concentrated on the most challenging operations such as target backplate exchange. To enlarge considerations of RH activity, a preliminary remote handling handbook (PRHH) was written.This document proposes to adopt a maintenance classification of components similar to that existing for ITER. Design guidelines and recommendations are provided to designers, taking into account the state of the art in Remote Handling technology. For each area of the facility: accelerator facility, target facility, test facilities and conventional facilities, a first attempt of classification was made according to past Reliability, Availability and Maintainability studies (RAM analysis). When possible, proposals for maintenance solutions were made for each area of the facility and for each component identified in the previous analysis. This paper summarises the results and conclusions of this document.