The European Dual Coolant Lithium Lead breeding blanket for DEMO: status and perspectives

During the last years CIEMAT has been leading the activities in the European Program to develop an integral breeding blanket with advanced performances to work in a realistic DEMO scenario. This blanket is the dual coolant lithium lead (DCLL) working at a limited temperature in order to allow the use of conventional materials and technologies. The design of this blanket was finished, including the definition of the tritium extraction system and tritium simulations. Then, determined by the selection of other two concepts as driver blankets for DEMO, the focus was put on developing a novel BB still based on the DCLL concept but working at higher temperatures, thus increasing the plant net efficiency. In this work, a summary of the status of the DCLL is presented, together with some ideas for developing an advanced high temperature DCLL in the near future.