Packing experiment of breeder pebbles into water cooled solid breeder test blanket module for ITER

Hirose, Takanori; Seki, Yohji; Tanigawa, Hisashi; Tanigawa, Hiroyasu; Tsuru, Daigo; Enoeda, Mikio; Serizawa, Hisashi*; Yamaoka, Hiroto*

This paper describes packing experiment of tritium breeder pebbles into a full-scale Tritium-Breeder-Container (TBC) mockup. A full scale mockup of the TBC for Water Cooled Solid Breeder - Test Blanket Module has been successfully developed using a reduced activation ferritic steel, F82H. A full-scale TBC mock-up was successfully fabricated with the fiber laser welding, and its dimensions are 74 112 990 mm. It was confirmed to be gastight under pressurized helium up to 0.5 MPa. By using the fabricated mockup, packing tests were performed with LiTiO pebbles of 1mm diameter. The pebbles were packed into the TBC through sweep gas lines penetrating the tube plates. X-ray tomography revealed that dense packing was uniformly achieved in the whole TBC.