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Fusion fuels and tritium cycle

9 articles

FLiBe

FLiBe is a molten salt of lithium fluoride and beryllium fluoride, developed at Oak Ridge in the 1940s and now a leading coolant and tritium breeder for fusion blankets.

Isotope separation system

An isotope separation system is part of a fusion reactor's tritium plant that separates deuterium from tritium so recovered fuel can be recycled, typically by cryogenic distillation.

ITER blanket

The ITER blanket is the system of modular panels lining the ITER vacuum vessel that absorbs heat and neutrons from the plasma and shields the vessel and magnets.

Lithium ceramic pebbles

Lithium ceramic pebbles are millimeter-sized granules of lithium ceramics, mainly lithium orthosilicate and lithium metatitanate, that breed tritium fuel when struck by fusion neutrons in reactor blankets.

Lithium-lead eutectic

The lithium-lead eutectic, written Pb-17Li or Pb-16Li, is a liquid lead-lithium alloy with a melting point of about 235 °C used as a tritium breeder in fusion reactors.

Tritium breeding ratio

The tritium breeding ratio is the tritium produced in a fusion reactor's lithium blanket per tritium burned in the plasma; it must exceed 1 for self-sufficient fuel.

Tritium fuel cycle

The tritium fuel cycle is the closed loop of processes by which a deuterium-tritium fusion plant recovers unburned fuel from the exhaust and breeds replacement tritium from lithium.

Tritium Laboratory Karlsruhe

The Tritium Laboratory Karlsruhe (TLK, German: Tritiumlabor Karlsruhe) is a research facility at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, dedicated in 1993 for handling tritium, the radioactive isotope of hydrogen.

Tritium Systems Test Assembly

The Tritium Systems Test Assembly, or TSTA, was a Los Alamos National Laboratory facility, begun in 1978, for full-scale testing of deuterium-tritium fuel processing for fusion reactors.