Fincantieri enters the green cutting-edge project "ITER"

Trieste, January 20, 2020 – Fincantieri has been awarded a prestigious order, worth almost 100 million euros, for a number of high-profile equipment furniture and installations as part of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), a project aimed at building an experimental nuclear fusion reactor, first of this kind, and acknowledged as one of the most ambitious initiatives in the world in the renewable energies field.

A temporary consortium has been established for the execution of the activities. It includes Fincantieri itself as the main contractor, its subsidiary Fincantieri SI, active in the field of plant design and industrial electrical, electronic and electromechanical components, Delta-ti Impianti, specialized in mechanical plant engineering, and Comes, specialized in electrical plant engineering.

ITER Organization is the supranational body, headquartered in France, participated and funded by the European Union, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the United States of America. The organization runs the ITER project, with construction currently underway in Cadarache in the South of France. The project will demonstrate the scientific and technological feasibility of nuclear fusion, and will allow to gain all the necessary knowledge for the construction of a nuclear fusion reactor prototype. The product will be a first large-scale source of clean and unlimited energy through fusion reaction – also given increasing energy demand – by using cutting-edge technologies specially developed by the countries taking part in the program.

Alongside renewable energy resources, nuclear fusion could considerably help fighting against climate change. Besides its potential inexhaustibility, one of the fusion’s benefits, in fact, lies in the limited production of residual waste, envisaging a power source not requiring CO2 emissions, one of the greenhouse gasses responsible for global warming. Nuclear fusion is considered as highly efficient and clean because water is its starting source without waste production within the process. Furthermore, it represents a real scientific and engineering challenge, involving horizontally fields like superconductivity, cryogenics and high vacuum.

The CEO of Fincantieri, Giuseppe Bono, said: “This order has an extraordinary international importance, and testifies to the reputation that we have been able to earn in every field. Being involved in such a project, in fact, confirms the goodness of our strategies, and I refer in particular to those for diversification and constant investment in innovation and business sustainability. Now we will actively participate in the development of a completely different technology from the one used in the existing power plants and above all cleaner: an extremely ambitious goal that also reaffirms our capacity as integrator”.

Fincantieri SI, which represents the operating arm of Fincantieri for this project, works in the field of hybrid ship propulsion, including energy storage systems, and in the one of emission reductions, with specific technological solutions such as the electrification of ports. With the acquisition of this order, the company confirms its vocation to become a reference on the world market for all green applications, supported in this by its own research and development center.