Maintenance and Service Loops
L7 closes the loop from condition monitoring to spares, scheduling, and teleoperated intervention, so maintenance is planned from physics rather than the calendar.
Condition-driven, not calendar-driven
A fusion plant's high-value, high-radiation components (superconducting magnets, first wall, divertor, direct-energy-conversion electrodes, the tandem-mirror plug coils) do not fail on a schedule; they degrade under load. L7 maintenance service loops turn continuous condition monitoring into maintenance decisions: what to service, when, with which spare, and whether a human or a teleoperated system does it.
The loop
- Sense: twin health estimates and remaining-useful-life per component
- Decide: predictive maintenance ranks interventions by risk and lead time
- Supply: spare-parts lifecycle ensures the right part is staged
- Schedule: outage windows fed to the dispatch optimizer as hard constraints
- Execute: human or teleoperated intervention in radiation-controlled zones
- Learn: outcomes update RUL models across the fleet
Each stage is a distinct L7 service, but they form one loop: a rising strain trend on a REBCO magnet raises its remaining-useful-life risk, which triggers a spare check and an outage request, which the dispatch optimizer schedules against firm-power obligations, after which the intervention outcome updates the model that generated the trend. Nothing in the loop is manual bookkeeping.
Radiation makes hands-on maintenance slow and limited, so teleoperation and robotic intervention are first-class, not fallbacks. The breeder's activated first wall and blanket and the burner's neutron-exposed structures (5.44% neutron fraction still activates material) both require remote handling designed into the maintenance loop from the start.
The maintenance loop is validated today on twin-simulated degradation and historical component data. Real degradation replaces simulated degradation as units accumulate hours from FOAK onward; the loop structure is unchanged, and no availability is claimed for unbuilt hardware.