A new method for improving the tritium breeding and releasing performance of China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor phase II helium‐cooled ceramic breeder blanket

Abstract

China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR) is a brand new Tokamak reactor which is currently being designed to fill the intervals between ITER and future DEMO fusion reactor. It has two operation phases: phase I with Pf = 200 MW is to demonstrate steady-state operation; phase II with Pf = 1000 MW to validate DEMO technology. Helium-cooled ceramic breeder (HCCB) blanket is one of the candidate blanket concepts for CFETR. Until now, there are many research institutes which have performed conceptual designs and comprehensive analyses works for phase I HCCB blanket in detail. However, lately, the operational stage of CFETR has transformed from phase I to phase II, and the latest core design parameters have been just determined (major radius equals to 7.2 m, minor radius equals to 2.2 m). Therefore, the design and analyses work for HCCB blanket should also be initialized. In this work, based on the original integrated optimization method, the radial structure layout optimization of the outboard equatorial phase II HCCB blanket module is conducted by NTCOC. However, the calculation results show that the original optimization method provides inadequately optimized tritium breeding performance and insufficient tritium releasing ability under the condition of high fusion power. To solve these problems, a dynamic feedback is incorporated into the original optimization method for the first time, and then the calculation results show that the problem has been solved well after revision. This work can supply worthy guidance and reference for the conceptual design and comprehensive analyses of CFETR phase II HCCB blanket.