An enhanced, near-term HCPB design as driver blanket for the EU DEMO

The Helium Cooled Pebble Bed (HCPB) breeding blanket is a candidate as driver blanket for the EU DEMO. The reference design of the HCPB is based on a cooling plate “sandwich” arrangement built in Multi-Module Segments. This architecture significantly improved the tritium breeding performance (TBR = 1.15) and the plant circulating power (≈130 MW) compared to the former ITER-like “beer-box”-like design (TBR<1.10, plant circulating power>200 MW). However, several issues remain with this design, in which (1) the still large power required per He circulator (beyond the state-of-the-art for these components) and (2) the large tritium inventory foreseen in Be have been identified as the most…