Developing a commercial production process for 500 000 targets per day: A key challenge for inertial fusion energy

Abstract

As is true for current-day commercial power plants, a reliable and economic fuel supply is essential for the viability of future Inertial Fusion Energy ͑IFE͒ ͓Energy From Inertial Fusion, edited by W. J. Hogan ͑International Atomic Energy Agency, Vienna, 1995͔͒ power plants. While IFE power plants will utilize deuterium-tritium ͑DT͒ bred in-house as the fusion fuel, the "target" is the vehicle by which the fuel is delivered to the reaction chamber. Thus the cost of the target becomes a critical issue in regard to fuel cost. Typically six targets per second, or about 500 000/ day are required for a nominal 1000 MW͑e͒ power plant. The electricity value within a typical target is about $3, allocating 10% for fuel cost gives only 30 cents per target as-delivered to the chamber center. Complicating this economic goal, the target supply has many significant technical challengesfabricating the precision fuel-containing capsule, filling it with DT, cooling it to cryogenic temperatures, layering the DT into a uniform layer, characterizing the finished product, accelerating it to high velocity for injection into the chamber, and tracking the target to steer the driver beams to meet it with micron-precision at the chamber center.

Review on high repetition rate and mass production of the cryogenic targets for laser IFE

“…They require an excellent smoothness, sphericity, material uniformity, smooth inner- and outer-surface finish and low-cost production taking into account a future IFE power plant. Such quality parameters are important to overcome the hydrodynamic instabilities during implosion and to reach the ignition at which a nuclear fusion reaction becomes self-sustaining [2, 4, 8, 13, 22, 29, 35] .…”

“…The main element of IFE power plant is a target with cryogenic hydrogen fuel (solid hydrogen isotopes or their mixtures) that must be delivered to the target chamber center at significant rates. The repetition rate of 5–10 Hz leads to the amount of targets ( – ) each day [2] , and methodologies that are applicable to high repetition rate and mass manufacturing of IFE targets are required for fueling a future reactor. Therefore, the research fields related to the elaboration of the efficient fuel-layering methods for IFE applications are rapidly expanding.…”

Glassy Microspheres for Energy Applications

“…In fact, a reliable and economic fuel supply is essential for the viability of future ICF power plants, where the problem nowadays is not the pellet’s content, namely DT, but the container itself, namely the spherical capsule. It is estimated that six targets per second, or about 500,000/day, with a cost below 0.25 $/target (orders of magnitude less than current costs), will be required for a power plant with nominal electric output of 1000 MW [ 130 ]. The efforts to improve the quality of the targets [ 131 ] and to develop the possibility of their large-scale production have made significant progress in recent years.…”

Continuous and scalable polymer capsule processing for inertial fusion energy target shell fabrication using droplet microfluidics

“…ICF depends upon the precise interaction of multiple, powerful lasers and frozen hydrogen isotopes contained within small, spherical and concentric target shells, ultimately causing a fusion reaction at ~150 M°C. Commercial fusion energy production will require ~1,000,000 fuel targets per day, per reactor vessel, at an estimated 5000x unit cost reduction to ~$0.20 5 . One design for viable IFE targets 6 , 7 ( ϕ 0.5 mm–4 mm), essentially comprise spherical shells (50–100 um wall thickness) of a low density (~250 mg/cm 3 ), with interconnected voids (each <1 um diameter), with extreme sphericity 8 (>99.9%, <50 nm roughness variation), and a high degree of concentricity (>99.0%).…”