Radiation analysis of the ITER pellet injection system

Abstract

The results of neutronics calculations for the pellet injection system of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) are described. Hands-on maintenance of components in the pellet injection room results in a considerable simplification of maintenance support equipment and in greater system availability. The basic configuration of the pellet injection system includes small-diameter guide tubes with which the pellet may have several small-angle collisions before reaching the plasma. The pellet injector port through which the guide tubes pass will be shared with ITER plasma diagnostics, so the calculation takes into account penetrations to accommodate numerous channels for a neutron spectrometer and neutron and gamma-ray cameras. The conservative assumption of steady-state operation of ITER for 1000 days was taken as the baseline for calculating the activation of components in the pellet injection room. The plasma configuration is based on the current ITER guidelines, the first wall configuration is based on the most recently updated configuration, and the blanket configuration is based on the US proposal for the blanket. The plasma, coils, and blanket regions were analyzed with the Monte Carlo code MCNP. The transport of neutrons through the penetrations was also performed with MCNP. The pellet injection room was modeled with themore » two-dimensional discrete ordinates code DORT, which was also used for the transport of neutrons during operation and of gamma rays caused by activation. The activation calculations were carried out with the REBATE code. Results from this study indicate that restricted personnel access to the pellet injection room is possible, so limited hands-on maintenance can be performed on the majority of the components in the room.« less