Shield water system design options to improve the safety of fusion reactor blankets
- MIT Plasma Fusion Center, Cambridge, MA (United States)
The overall safety of a fusion reactor is largely tied to the performance of its blanket/shield system. Blanket designs for near-term fusion reactors such as ITER typically generate substantial amounts of afterheat. In the event of an undercooling event such as Loss-of-Coolant (LOCA) or Loss-of-Flow (LOFA) this afterheat can overheat the blanket structure, causing failure and possibly releasing radioactive materials into the surroundings. Many analyses have been performed on various blanket designs to characterize their response to undercooling accidents. However, most such analyses focus on the blanket itself, and not on the shield and shield cooling system. This paper, by contrast, focuses on the potential of the shield and the shield cooling system to be an effective heat sink inside the reactor vacuum vessel, thereby improving the performance of the blanket during an undercooling accident. The paper demonstrates that the performance of the shield cooling system during such an accident can significantly affect the response of the blanket and can in some cases make the difference between a blanket surviving the accident or not. The paper also demonstrates that designing a shield cooling system which serves as an in-vacuum-vessel heat sink in the event of an undercooling accident can be done inexpensively, and without degrading normal operational performance. In this authors opinion, the designers of future fusion machines with potentially large afterheat generation rates, such as ITER should consider incorporating such a {open_quotes}safe{close_quotes} shield cooling system.
- OSTI ID:
- 197105
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-940664-; TRN: 95:005767-0283
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: ISFNT-3: international symposium on fusion nuclear technology, Los Angeles, CA (United States), 27 Jun - 1 Jul 1994; Other Information: PBD: 1994; Related Information: Is Part Of Third international symposium on fusion nuclear technology; PB: 362 p.
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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