Disambiguation - If you are looking for the Texas city, see Blanket (Texas).
In a nuclear fusion reactor, the blanket is the layer of the containment structure surrounding the first wall and the divertor. The main purpose of the blanket is to transmit the energy captured by the two innermost layers of the containment structure and the capture of the neutrons produced by the melting reactions. Creating a robust and efficient blanket is one of the major obstacles to solving the construction of a commercially sustainable casting reactor.
The transmission of energy obtained from nuclear fusion processes within the reactor is essentially done by sliding a fluid inside the blanket. The fluid exits the blanket and turns a turbine directly, or passes through a heat exchanger and heats up a second fluid to spin the turbine to produce electricity. The fluid flowing in the blanket can not be water because it is not efficient for thermodynamic performance.
In the current state of studies on the casting reactor, helium or lead and lithium alloys are expected.
In some of the theoretical configurations for a casting reactor, you can use the neutron capture inside the blanket to produce new fuel to inject into the plasma chamber in which nuclear reactions occur. For example, if the reactor fuel is a deuterium-tritium mixture circulating within a tokamak it could be possible to build a blanket inside which the helium circulates.
The ITER Experimental Fusion Reactor, under construction in France at Cadarache, does not include the use of a blanket in fuel production. It is expected that such a blanket will be introduced in the successor to ITER, the DEMO test fusion reactor that is expected to be built in the coming decades.
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