Tritium breeding blanket

Assembled from 17 blocks · 2 evidence · 19 related

1. Story
2. A breeding blanket surrounds the fusion plasma with lithium-bearing material so that the 14.1 MeV neutrons released by deuterium-tritium fusion convert lithium into fresh tritium, which is then extracted and returned to the fuel cycle. The design requirement is a tritium breeding ratio above 1.0 — commonly quoted as needing a margin above that to cover losses, decay and start-up inventory for the next machine — because there is no external supply large enough to fuel a fleet of power plants. No fusion device has yet demonstrated a closed breeding cycle. ITER is designed to carry six Test Blanket Systems, mock-ups placed in equatorial ports to test breeding concepts in a real fusion neutron environment; two of them are European, the Helium-Cooled Pebble-Bed and the Helium-Cooled Lead Lithium designs. The distinction that matters for this Journey is that the ITER Test Blanket Module programme is an experiment on breeding, not a working breeding system.
3. Knowledge
4. Tritium breeding blanket
5. Lithium (as breeding feedstock)
6. Connections
7. Lithium (as breeding feedstock)
8. ITER
9. Tritium
10. ITER's declared target date for the start of deuterium-tritium operation
11. Tritium breeding blanket
12. Salar de Atacama
13. Lithium-ion battery storage
14. The lithium price collapses after its 2022 peak
15. Evidence
16. ITER is designed to test breeding blanket mock-ups rather than to operate a closed breeding cycle, and no fusion device has yet demonstrated tritium self-sufficiency
17. The world civil tritium stockpile, sourced almost entirely from CANDU heavy-water reactors, is of order tens of kilograms, is projected to peak and then decline as those reactors retire, and decays continuously at a 12.3-year half-life