Tritium permeation issues for helium-cooled breeding blankets

Abstract

Tritium permeation through Breeding Blanket and Steam Generator heat transfer areas is a crucial aspect for the design of the next generation DEMO fusion power plants. Tritium is generated inside the breeder, dissolves in and permeates through materials, thus leading to a potential hazard for the environment. For this reason it is important to carry out the tritium migration analysis for a specific DEMO blanket configuration in order to predict the released amount of tritium during the plant operation. Unfortunately, tritium assessments are often affected by several uncertainties implying very important modelling and parametric issues. In this study the main permeation issues are identified and possible solutions are discussed to face the modelling issues and the parametric uncertainties affecting the T migration assessments for the two DEMO helium-cooled breeding blankets, i.e.: 1) Helium-Cooled Pebble Beds (HCPB) and 2) Helium-Cooled Lithium-Lead (HCLL). For these two heliumcooled blanket concepts various tritium migration analyses will be carried out by means of the computational tool FUS-TPC in order to define proper and feasible tritium mitigation techniques which are needed to keep the tritium losses lower than the allowable environmental release (i.e. 20 Ci/d).