Change in properties of superconducting magnet materials by fusion neutron irradiation

A fusion reactor will generate a lot of high energy neutron and much energy will be taken out of the neutrons by a blanket system. Since some neutrons will stream out of a plasma vacuum vessel through neutral beam injection ports and penetrate a blanket system, a superconducting magnet system, which provides high magnetic field to confirm high energy particles, will be irradiated by a certain amount of neutrons. By developing the new NBI system or by reducing the penetration, the neutron fluence to the superconducting magnet will be able to be reduced. However, it is not easy to achieve the lower streaming and penetration at the present. Therefore, investigations on irradiation behavior of superconducting magnet materials are desired and some novel researches have been performed from 1970s. In general, the critical current of the superconducting wire increases under fast neutron environment comparing with that of the non-irradiated wire, and then decreased to almost zero as an increase of neutron fluence. On the other hand, the critical temperature of the wire starts to get down around 1022 n/m2 of neutron fluence and the temperature margin will be decreased during the operation by the neutron irradiation. In this paper, some aspects of irradiated materials will be overviewed and general tendency will be discussed focussing on knock-on effect of fast neutron and long range ordering of A15 compounds