Magnetic Confinement Fusion—Reactor Blanket Technologies

Magnetic Confinement Fusion—Development Facilities

“…Initially, two TBMs are planned to use water-cooling and two helium-cooling. Further details of the ITER TBM programme are discussed by Boccaccini et al (2020).…”

“…However, the significant amount of tritium fuel, ~14.5 kg over a period of ~20 years, required meet the project lifetime goal of achieving an average first wall neutron fluence of 0.3 MW.yr.m -2 means that tritium must be externally supplied from existing civil fission stockpiles and that fuel reprocessing on an unprecedented scale will be required to ensure efficient consumption of tritium. A large-scale tritium reprocessing plant therefore forms the core of the ITER Fuel Cycle system (Boccaccini et al, 2020): an annual tritium reprocessing capability corresponding to ~25 times the onsite tritium inventory will be required. A substantial high vacuum pumping capability is a further critical element.…”

“…Finally, fuelling of DT plasmas by gas injection and cryogenic pellet injection closes the fuel cycle. Further considerations related to the design of reactor-scale fuel cycle systems can be found in Boccaccini et al (2020).…”

“…To provide tritium breeding in HELIAS-5B, adaptation of tokamak DEMO blanket concepts is under study. The HCPB concept (Boccaccini et al, 2020) appears favourable due to its low space requirements and very high tritium breeding ratio (TBR = 1.38 for HELIAS 5-B (Häussler et al, 2018)). The FFHR blanket design uses a molten salt (LiF-BeF2) self-cooled liquid tritium breeder, referred to as FLIBE (Sagara et al, 2000), though a more refined FLINABE (LiF-NaF-BeF2) concept has been proposed to increase the acceptable temperature range, achieving a higher thermal efficiency (Sagara et al, 2017).…”