Impact of ports on the breeding performance of liquid metal and solid breeder blankets in the DEMONET configuration

Abstract

With the help of the MCNP Monte Carlo code an appropriate torus sector model of 4 × 11.25° is set up to evaluate the blanket port effect for DEMONET, the DEMO version of the NET reactor. The impact of horizontal blanket ports on the tritium breeding ratio is evaluated for a helium-cooled solid breeder blanket and a liquid metal blanket using Pb-17Li or, alternatively, pure lithium metal as breeding material. It is observed that the tritium breeding ratio decreases smoothly with the number of ports allowing a linear interpolation. There is a significant dependence of the port effect on the blanket variant and the port configuration, although the quantitative differences are small. In a rough approximation it is possible to obtain an estimate of the blanket port effect on the basis of the reduced blanket coverage.