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DOE, INL, Kairos talk nuclear energy at Senate committee hearing
It has been 10 months since President Trump signed several executive orders that have reshaped the nuclear energy industry and set lofty goals for initiatives like the development and deployment of new nuclear technology.
One such initiative, the DOE’s Nuclear Reactor Pilot Program, calls for at least 3 of the 11 reactors in the program to achieve criticality by July 4, 2026. Some have questioned whether this target is feasible.
Yoichi Watanabe, Mohamed A. Abdou, Mahmoud Z. Youssef
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 15 | Number 2 | March 1989 | Pages 617-622
Design of an Engineering Test Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/FST89-A39766
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The next fusion experimental reactor such as ITER requires tritium breeding because of the high tritium cost and its limited availability from non-fusion sources, in addition to demonstrating breeding capability of commercial D-T reactors. A tritium fuel cycle model was developed to compute the required tritium breeding ratio(TBR) by taking into account reactor down-time. The results show that TBR should be unity to achieve 3 MW * Year/m2 of neutron fluence in 10 years for a steady-state reactor with 600 MW fusion power and 25% system availability provided 5 kg of initial tritium supply. If the external tritium supply is increased to 20 kg, the required TBR is 0.9. The estimated TBR is very sensitive to the variation of the tritium burn-up fraction in plasma and the tritium residence time in the tritium processing system. For example, decreasing the burn-up fraction from 5% to 1% leads to a 25% increase in the required TBR. Thus these parameters must be carefully examined in future work.