Neutronic Assessments towards a Novel First Wall Design for a Stellarator Fusion Reactor with Dual Coolant Lithium Lead Breeding Blanket

Abstract

The Stellarator Power Plant Studies Prospective R&D Work Package in the Eurofusion Programme was settled to bring the stellarator engineering to maturity, so that stellarators and particularly the HELIAS (HELical-axis Advanced Stellarator) configuration could be a possible alternative to tokamaks. However, its complex geometry makes designing a Breeding Blanket (BB) that fully satisfies the requirements for such a HELIAS configuration, which is a difficult task. Taking advantage of the acquired experience in BB design for DEMO tokamak, CIEMAT is leading the development of a Dual Coolant Lithium Lead (DCLL) BB for a HELIAS configuration. To answer the specific HELIAS challenges, new and advanced solutions have been proposed, such as the use of fully detached First Wall (FW) based on liquid metal Capillary Porous Systems (CPS). The proposed solutions have been studied in a simplified 1D model that can help to estimate the relative variations in Tritium Breeding Ratio (TBR) and displacement per atom (dpa) to verify their effectiveness in simplifying the BB integration and improving the machine availability while keeping the main BB nuclear functions (i.e., tritium breeding, heat extraction and shielding). This preliminary study demonstrates that the use of FW CPS would drastically reduce the radiation damage received by the blanket by 29% in some of the selected configurations along with a small decrease of 4.9% in TBR. This could even be improved to just a 3.8% TBR reduction by using a graphite reflector. Such an impact on the TBR is considered affordable, and the results presented, although preliminary in essence, have shown the existence of margins for further development of the FW CPS concept for HELIAS, as they have been not found, at least to date, to be significant showstoppers for the use of this technological solution.