R.H. divertor maintenance — the divertor test platform

The ITER divertor assembly consists in 60 cassettes located in the bottom region of the vacuum vessel. Because of erosion and damage, their replacement is expected to be required eight times during the machine lifetime. The cassettes will be remotely withdrawn from the vessel through dedicated ducts and they will be transported to a hot cell for refurbishment. To demonstrate the feasibility of the withdrawal operations, and to optimise the maintenance scenario and the handling equipment design, a test facility has been set-up at the ENEA Research Centre of Brasimone (Italy), i.e. the divertor test platform (DTP) that allows to simulate, in full scale, all handling operations inside the vacuum vessel. This paper describes the objectives, test programme, layout, test results and future activities of the DTP.