Progress on neutronic analysis for CFETR

Abstract

The neutron-induced irradiation field is a key problem in a fusion reactor related to nuclear responses, shielding design, nuclear safety and thermo-hydraulic analysis. To support the system design of the China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR), a comprehensive analysis of the irradiation field has been conducted in support of many newly developed advanced tools. This paper first summarizes recent progress on the related effort to develop neutronics code including the geometry conversion tool cosVMPT, Monte Carlo variance reduction technology and ‘on-the-fly’ global variance reduction. Such developed tools have been fully validated and applied to the CFETR nuclear analysis. The neutron irradiation has been evaluated on the CFETR water-cooled ceramic breeder blanket, divertor, vacuum vessel (VV), superconductive coils and four kinds of heating systems: electron cyclotron resonance heating, ion cyclotron resonance heating, low hybrid wave and neutral beam injection. The nuclear responses of tritium breeding ratio, heating, irradiation damage and the hydrogen/helium production rate of material have been analyzed. In the case of neutron damage and overheating, deposition on the superconductive coils and VV, the interface and the shielding design among heating systems, and the blanket and other systems, has been initialized. The results show the shielding design can meet the requirement of coil and VV after several iterated neutronics calculations.