COMPARATIVE AVAILABILITY ANALYSIS OF THE 4 EUROPEAN DEMO BLANKET CONCEPTS IN VIEW OF THE SELECTION EXERCISE

The four blanket concepts developed within the European Fusion Technol ogy program and supported by the European Community are assessed from the reliability/availability point of view. The reliability of blanket segments influences the availability of the whole plant. In case of a failure, the affected blanket segments must be repaired or exchanged. The mean down time necessary for segments repair or exchange is an im portant factor for the overall plant availability. It has been assumed to be 3 months for all concepts. To allow a meaningful comparative as sessment, an identical evaluation scheme was applied to all concepts u sing the same basic data. The results show that differences in the ava ilability of blanket concepts are relatively small, with availabilitie s ranging between 84.3 and 87.7%. The absolute numbers, however, are s ensitive to assumptions and to failure modes taken into consideration. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science S.A.