Lessons Learned from KSTAR Construction and Commissioning

KSTAR is an advanced tokamak with fully superconducting coils for the steady state research, which began in December 1995 and was completed in July 2008. As a single science project, it has been marked as the largest construction project in the history of Korea. During the construction period, we encountered several challenges, such as technical issues, cost overrun and schedule slippage. Nevertheless, we managed to overcome the difficulties through the devotion of all the participants under a strong leadership, and we finally succeeded in the first plasma discharge of 133kA/865ms in July 2008. Therefore, KSTAR, the first Nb3Sn based fully superconducting tokamak, has been recorded as the device that passed its commissioning without failure at its first trial. And as we speak, KSTAR is sustaining its momentum for the next campaign: it is getting ready for its operation of the toroidal magnetic field of 3 Tesla. At this presentation, we focus on the actual applications and resolutions applied to surmount the difficulties we faced during the KSTAR construction, as well as the events that occurred behind the scenes. Despite the scale difference between KSTAR and ITER, we strongly believe that the presentation will provide a great insight to the construction of the ITER device, which is very similar to KSTAR in terms of design and characteristics.