Investigation of Lanthanides as Neutron Multipliers for Hybrid and Fusion Reactor Blankets

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Abstract
The neutronic performance of three lanthanides (149Sm, europium, and gadolinium) as neutron multiplier for the blanket of a fusion-fission (hybrid) and a pure fusion reactor has been evaluated and compared with that of beryllium and lead.During the calculations, the fission zone is made up of UO2 rods from the LOTUS experimental hybrid facility now under construction at the Nuclear Engineering Laboratory of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. In fusion blanket the fuel zone is replaced by pure lithium.The calculations were performed for two different boundary conditions for the left boundary: (a) reflecting, representative of a typical confinement geometry, and (b) vacuum, which represents a typical blanket experiment in plane geometry.For a vacuum left boundary, threshold reactions are reduced by a factor of ∼2 while 1/v-type reactions are decreased by a factor of between 5 and 10, as a consequence of the softer spectrum produced by a reflecting left boundary. In general, the r...

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