The EU advanced dual coolant blanket concept

The advanced dual coolant (A-DC) blanket is one of the EU advanced concepts to be investigated in the frame of the long-term power plant conceptual study (PPCS). Its basic concept—following the ARIES-ST concept—is based on the use of helium-cooled ferritic steel structure, the self-cooled Pb–17Li breeding zone, and SiC/SiC flow channel inserts. The latter serves as electrical and thermal insulators and therefore minimize the pressure losses and enable a relatively high Pb–17Li exit temperature leading to a high thermal efficiency. The present work on PPCS is drawn extensively on the preparatory study on plant availability (PPA) carried out in 1999 where a maximum neutron wall load of 5 MW/m2 (corresponding maximum surface heat load of 0.9 MW/m2) was given in the reference case of the A-DC blanket. In the following stage of PPCS the A-DC blanket is normalized and adapted to a typical size of commercial reactors (e.g. 1500 MWe) which requires iterative calculations between the blanket layout and the system code analysis. The status of the work with some idea improvements is reported.