To realize tritium self-sustaining cycle through tritium breeding blanket has been one of the core technologies of future fusion reactor. Therefore the design and function of blanket must be validated by neutronic experiment under D-T neutron environment. But due to the scarcity of DT neutron source, and highly radioactivity during neutronic experiments, it is very difficult to validate the nuclear response of the blanket, the data of tritium production rate mainly rely on Monte Carlo simulation.

Recently, a research group led by ZHU Qingjun from Institute of Plasma Physics, Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (HFIPS), made progress in the experimental research on tritium production of fusion blanket mock-up, and obtained the experimental data of tritium production rate.

The program was launched five years ago, aiming at evaluating the nuclear performance of each blanket, by irradiating mock-ups at the DT neutron source. In this research, the team manufactured a water-cooled ceramic breeder blanket mock-up. They also carried out the neutronic experiment and achieved first-hand data with it.

It’s proved that the experiments were in good agreement with the simulations. Considering the design margin, it fully met the requirements of tritium self-sustaining for future fusion reactor, which provided the corresponding theoretical and experimental basis for the engineering realization of breeding blanket.

This work is supported by China National Magnetic Confined Fusion Science Program (No. 2015GB108002), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 11705230), and National special project for magnetic confined nuclear fusion energy of China (No. 2017YFE0301601, 2017YFE0301604).

Experiments setup and model (Imaged by ZHU Qingjun)