Neutronics assessment for Detailed Helium-Cooled And Water-Cooled DEMO Breeder Blanket Concepts

The Water-Cooled Lithium-Lead Breeding Blanket (WCLL) and Helium-Cooled Pebble Bed (HCPB) are two leading breeding blanket concept candidates to become the driver blanket for the EU-DEMO reactor. As a breeding material, WCLL uses Lithium-Lead alloy, HCPB uses lithium orthosilicate, and all breeding units have tubes for cooling purposes. The same concepts, as neutrons multiplier, use Li-Pb alloy and Be. The estimation of neutron fluxes, nuclear heating and dose rates are essential to assess the nuclear performance of the breeding blankets. It is a necessary calculation that supports the design of the two breeder blanket concepts of the DEMO nuclear fusion reactor. Two widely used codes, MCNP6 with FENDL-3.2 nuclear data library and ADVANTG, which employs the FW-Cadis method to reduce the variance of Monte Carlo simulation results, were used in this paper.