A tritium catalytic fusion reactor concept

Abstract

The performance of deuterium targets with small tritium seeding is analysed. The objective is to take advantage of the features of fusion reactivity ratios for very high burning temperatures in order to minimize tritium needs and to reduce the ignition temperature as much as possible. It is found theroretically and computationally that there is a regime for deuterium-tritium DTx plasmas (with x ≈ 0.03) where the final content of tritium in the pellet debris is the same as the initial contents in the original pellet. No external blankets to breed tritium would thus be needed. Although energy gains are limited because of the small fusion yield of DD reactions, the energy gain of DTx targets is higher than that of pure deuterium plasmas. The ignition temperature and the driver energy are lower than the corresponding values of DD pellets. This concept is also very useful to reduce the tritium inventory and to simplify the complexity of inertial fusion reactors which use stoichiometric DT.

Effects of different nuclear reactions on internal tritium breeding in deuterium fusion

“…In that case, the mechanical expansion loss is negligible if the fusion burn propagation is supersonic, but heat conduction losses to the surrounding cold fuel must be included. Earlier estimates [3,5] indicated that both models give very similar results on ignition requirements and burnup performance.…”

“…Very high ignition temperatures are one of the main problems in advanced fuel fusion targets [1]. It has been demonstrated that adding a small amount of tritium can reduce the ignition temperature of deuterium and of advanced fuel inertial fusion targets [2][3][4][5]. Tritium will probably be the most significant radiological problem in future DT fusion reactors.…”

“…A different ignition model could be used to study these cases, based on the spark model of a central hot core surrounded by cold fuel [5,9]. In that case, the mechanical expansion loss is negligible if the fusion burn propagation is supersonic, but heat conduction losses to the surrounding cold fuel must be included.…”