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RIC panel discusses pathway to fusion commercialization
Fusion leaders at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s annual Regulatory Information Conference discussed the path forward for regulating the burgeoning fusion industry. The speakers discussed government and private industry initiatives in the United States and United Kingdom, with a focus on efforts shaping the near-term deployment of commercial fusion machines.
A recurring theme was the need to explain the difference between fission and fusion. Representatives from the Department of Energy and Type One Energy highlighted this as an important distinction for regulators, as it will allow fusion to undergo its own independent maturation process for developing standards and regulations in the same way that fission has. Lea Perlas, Fusion Program director at the Virginia Department of Health, said that confusion between fission and fusion has been a common cause for misplaced concerns among community members surrounding Commonwealth Fusion Systems’ proposed fusion plant site near Richmond, Va.
Gilbert Bellanger, Jean Jacques Rameau
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 36 | Number 3 | November 1999 | Pages 296-308
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST99-A110
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In addition to the tritiated water produced by the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique, large quantities result from the development of controlled fusion reactors for power generation (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor). To obtain a new industrial method of reducing tritiated water, an electrolytic rather than a chemical process was developed. A prototype electrolyzer is described and the results obtained are given. In this process, the tritium recovery system is based on the principle of a gas diffusion Pd-Ag electrode incorporating a tritium charging cathode, which produces very pure hydrogen isotope gases. This is for converting 3H2O to high-purity 3H2 and its isotopes from tritiated water with >30 TBq/cm3 radioactivity (>50% 3H2O). The prototype module has been tested in a hot laboratory. The overall operating time exceeded 1500 h, and 6 g of gaseous tritium were produced without difficulty.
