Coordinated design of the cartridge-type blanket and the ceramic pebble divertor for the helical reactor FFHR-b3

Abstract

Abstract The cartridge-type blanket for the helical reactor has been updated and named the CARDISTRY-B3. Together with this, the ceramic pebble ergodic limiter/divertor system named the REVOLVER-D3 has been adopted in the design. There was a difficulty in fabricating the blanket cartridges due to the first wall shape with three-dimensional surface. This difficulty has been removed by introducing the slit first wall, where the first wall surface is formed by alternately stacking solid metal plates and porous plates made of metal or ceramic. The liquid metal flowing inside the blanket cartridge oozes out through the porous plates and forms the surface flow covering the first wall. Solid target plates for the helical divertor has been omitted, because the divertor region is already covered and protected by the liquid metal surface flow. The liquid metal freely falls inside the blanket cartridges by the gravity force and then exhausted to the pool set on the lower port. The ceramic pebbles, which are dropped to the inboard-side ergodic layer to form the flowing limiter divertor, also flow into the liquid metal pool. The pebbles and liquid metal are individually elevated again by screw conveyers. Since the free surface of the liquid metal is exposed to the plasma, the vapor pressure of the working liquid metal should be low enough. Ternary or quadruple alloys, which include Li, Sn, Pb (or Bi), and Er, have been selected as the candidates of the functional liquid metal for the CARDISTRY-B3 that satisfies the requirements of low vapor pressure, low density, low melting point, and high tritium breeding ratio. In this study, the coordinated design of CARDISTRY-B3 and REVOLVER-D3 for the FFHR-b3 is presented. The FFHR-b3 is one of the design options that aims at demonstration of 100 MW net electricity with two times larger devise size than LHD.