Speaker
Description
Fusion blankets serve three primary functions: 1) breeding tritium fuel, 2) power harnessing to convert fusion energy to usable heat, and 3) shielding magnet systems from radiation damage. Liquid breeder blanket concepts include lead-lithium eutectic (PbLi), molten lithium and beryllium fluoride at eutectic composition (FLiBe), or liquid lithium (Li) as the breeding medium with self-cooled, water-cooled, and helium-cooled options for heat removal. Solid breeder blankets concepts include a wide variety of lithium-containing ceramics as the breeder and hydrogen-seeded helium as a purge gas to harvest bred tritium. A separate fluid (e.g., water, helium) then serves as the primary power harnessing medium for solid breeders. Multiple fission irradiation experiments are being designed to test the various breeding and power harnessing aspects of breeder materials in a nuclear environment.
Although a wide range of solid breeder materials have undergone irradiation testing over the past decades, numerous novel solid breeder materials have been fabricated but have never been irradiated. Consequently, the tritium release performance of these breeder materials is unknown. Fifteen different solid breeder materials will be irradiated in the Neutron RADiography reactor (NRAD) to produce a small amount of tritium in each specimen. The tritium release profiles for these solid breeder materials will be characterized through thermal desorption spectroscopy. A separate irradiation campaign will be performed on PbLi as a nuclear-driven thermal convection loop. The primary objectives of this irradiation are to differentiate the irradiation enhanced effect of corrosion and also characterize tritium transport in the experiment. This presentation will detail the designs of both irradiation experiments.
| Speaker affiliation | Idaho National Laboratory |
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