Development of water-cooled cylindrical blanket in JA DEMO

Abstract

The concept of the tritium breeding blanket for Japan’s DEMOnstration fusion reactor (JA DEMO) has been developed with pressure tightness against in-box Loss-of-coolant accidents based on a water-cooled solid breeder concept. The cooling conditions are designed on the PWR (pressurized-water reactor) water conditions which are the coolant temperature of 290 ºC - 325 ºC and the operating pressure of 15.5 MPa, respectively. The point of the blanket design is to reduce the amount of structural material in casing as well as to ensure its pressure tightness. This is because a decrease in the amount of structural material improves TBR (Tritium Breeding Ratio). A cylindrical structure, a thin wall casing structure which ensures pressure tightness and could increase TBR, is feasible. However, a relatively larger useless space is expected between modules when the cylindrical blanket modules are arranged in a vacuum vessel, which could decrease TBR. Therefore, the cylindrical blanket modules are to be in a close-packed arrangement to reduce useless space. The Be12Ti block (which shows a minor swelling compared to Be) is selected to achieve the target TBR as the net Be density is equivalent to the case of the Be pebble. The use of Be12Ti blocks can reduce or remove the cooling piping inside the module as the Be12Ti block has a higher thermal conductivity than pebbles. As a result of the neutronics, Finite element method, and Computational Fluid Dynamics analyses, it was found that the target TBR value can be achieved in cylindrical structure blanket that ensure pressure tightness.