Safety and personnel access aspects of low activation fusion blankets

The use of silicon carbide and carbon materials for structural applications in fusion reactor first wall and blanket regions has been proposed and a continuing effort spent on the development of the ceramics technology. The advantages identified are an extremely low induced radioactivity inventory, a high temperature operating capability, abundant raw material resource availability, and minimized plasma impurity effects. One of the unique features of the applications of these materials to fusion reactor blanket designs is that no alloying element is needed in order to assure the specified mechanical properties such as occurs in metal alloys. The major source of long term radioactivity in these materials is impurities. The impurity elements and their concentrations carried over to the blanket structure during fabrication can be minimized by proper fabrication procedures and techniques. The safety and personnel access aspects of such fusion blankets in conjunction with the impurity element concentration are the main subjects of this paper