Fuel cycle design for ITER and its extrapolation to DEMO

ITER is the first fusion device that continuously processes DT plasma exhaust and supplies recycled fuel in a closed loop. All the tritium and deuterium in the exhaust are recovered, purified and returned to the tokamak with minimal delay, so that extended burn can be sustained with limited inventory. To maintain the safety of the entire facility, plant scale detritiation systems will also continuously run to remove tritium from the effluents at the maximum efficiency. In this entire tritium plant system, extremely high decontamination factor, that is the ratio of the tritium loss to the processing flow rate, is required for fuel economy and minimized tritium emissions, and the system design based on the state-of-the-art technology is expected to satisfy all the requirements without significant technical challenges. Considerable part of the fusion tritium system will be verified with ITER and its decades of operation experiences. Toward the DEMO plant that will actually generate energy and operate its closed fuel cycle, breeding blanket and power train that caries high temperature and pressure media from the fusion device to the generation system will be the major addition. For the tritium confinement, safety and environmental emission, particularly blanket, its coolant, and generation systems such as heat exchanger, steam generator and turbine will be the critical systems, because the tritium permeation from the breeder and handling large amount of high temperature, high pressure coolant will be further more difficult than that required for ITER. Detritiation of solid waste such as used blanket and divertor will be another issue for both tritium economy and safety. Unlike in the case of ITER that is regarded as experimental facility, DEMO will be expected to demonstrate the safety, reliability and social acceptance issue, even if economical feature is excluded. Fuel and environmental issue to be tested in the DEMO will determine the viability of the fusion as a future energy source. Some of the subjects cannot be expected to be within the extrapolation of ITER technology and require long term efforts paralleling ITER.