Speaker
Fred Thomas
(York Plasma Institute)
Description
Tritium self-sufficiency is a fundamental requirement for future DT fusion demonstration and commercial power plants. Hence, prior to the construction of expensive, complex fusion breeder blanket assemblies there should be a concerted effort to quantify and ultimately reduce the uncertainties associated with various nuclear observables. This will enable tritium self-sufficient blankets to be designed with a high degree of confidence.
The largest source of uncertainty for tritium breeding analysis is poor nuclear data. 'Clean' experimental work to better characterise individual fusion relevant isotopes has been undertaken at the University of Osaka and JAERI in Japan. 'Design-specific' experiments have been conducted at FNG, Italy where a blanket mock-up was irradiated and tritium production rates were measured.
The work presented here employs a recently developed simulation methodology, Total Monte Carlo (TMC), applied to the problem of uncertainty due to nuclear data. TMC uses nuclear data files produced by nuclear physics models. By changing values of fundamental nuclear parameters input to the T6 code system, nuclear data is generated for given isotopes. The neutronics of a problem is then simulated many times with this varied data, making it possible to produce PDFs of the desired observable quantities. In the work presented, the nuclear data uncertainty is quantified for observables, such as the Tritium Breeding Ratio (TBR) and neutron multiplication factor, for a lithium lead fusion blanket design.
Co-author
Fred Thomas
(York Plasma Institute, University of York, York, United Kingdom)
