Conceptual design of a water cooled breeder blanket for CFETR

•We proposed a water cooled ceramic breeder blanket with superheated steam.•Superheated steam is generated at the first wall and the front part of breeder zone.•Superheated steam has negligible impact on neutron absorption by coolant in FW and improves TBR.•The superheated steam at higher temperature can improve thermal efficiency.

China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR) is an ITER-like superconducting tokamak reactor. Its major radius is 5.7 m, minor radius is 1.6 m and elongation ratio is 1.8. Its mission is to achieve 50–200 MW of fusion power, 30–50% of duty time factor, and tritium breeding ratio not less than 1.2 to ensure the self-sufficiency. As one of the breeding blanket candidates for CFETR, a water cooled breeder blanket with superheated steam is proposed and its conceptual design is being carried out. In this design, sub-cooling water at 265 °C under the pressure of 7 MPa is fed into cooling plates in breeding zone and is heated up to 285 °C with saturated steam generated, and then this steam is pre-superheated up to 310 °C in first wall (FW), final, the pre-superheated steam coming from several blankets is fed into the other one blanket to superheat again up to 517 °C. Due to low density of superheated steam, it has negligible impact on neutron absorption by coolant in FW so that the high energy neutrons entering into breeder zone moderated by water in cooling plate help enhance tritium breeding by 6Li(n,α)T reaction. Li2TiO3 pebbles and Be12Ti pebbles are chosen as tritium breeder and neutron multiplier respectively, because Li2TiO3 and Be12Ti are expected to have better chemical stability and compatibility with water in high temperature. However, Be12Ti may lead to a reduction in tritium breeding ratio (TBR). Furthermore, a spot of sintered Be plate is used to improve neutron multiplying capacity in a multi-layer structure. As one alternative option, in spite of lower TBR, Pb is taken into account to replace Be plate in viewpoint of safety. In this contribution, study on neutronics and thermal design for a water cooled breeder blanket with superheated steam is reported.