Published papers

Blanket concept with a simplified interior for mass production has been developed using a mixed bed of Li2TiO3 and Be12Ti pebbles, coolant conditions of 15.5 MPa and 290-325 °C and cooling pipes without any partitions. Considering the continuity with the ITER test blanket module option of Japan and the engineering feasibility in its fabrication, our design study focused on a water-cooled solid breeding blanket using the mixed pebbles bed. Herein, we propose blanket segmentation corresponding to the shape and dimension of the blanket and routing of the coolant flow. Moreover, we estimate the overall tritium breeding ratio (TBR) with a torus configuration, based on the segmentation using three-dimensional (3D) Monte Carlo N-particle calculations. As a result, the overall TBR is 1.15. Our 3D neutronics analysis for TBR ensures that the blanket concept can achieve a self-sufficient supply of tritium.

Maintenance schemes are one of the critical issues in DEMO design, significantly affecting the configuration of in-vessel components, the size of toroidal field (TF) coil, the arrangement of poloidal field (PF) coils, reactor building, hot cell and so forth. Therefore, the maintenance schemes should satisfy many design requirements and criteria to assure reliable and safe plant operation and to attain reasonable plant availability. The plant availability depends on reliability of remote maintenance scheme, inspection of pipe connection and plasma operation. In this paper, various remote maintenance schemes for DEMO were comparatively assessed based on requirements for DEMO remote maintenance. From the view points of the reliability of inspection on hot cell, TF coil size, stored energy of PF coil and portability of segment, the banana shape segment transport using all vertical maintenance ports would be more probable DEMO reactor maintenance scheme, and it has key engineering issues such as in-vessel transferring mechanism of segment, pipe connection and conducting shell design for plasma vertical stability.