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November 8–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Japan gets new U for enrichment as global power and fuel plans grow
President Trump is in Japan today, with a visit with new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi on the agenda. Takaichi, who took office just last week as Japan’s first female prime minister, has already spoken in favor of nuclear energy and of accelerating the restart of Japan’s long-shuttered power reactors, as Reuters and others have reported. Much of the uranium to power those reactors will be enriched at Japan’s lone enrichment facility—part of Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd.’s Rokkasho fuel complex—which accepted its first delivery of fresh uranium hexafluoride (UF₆) in 11 years earlier this month.
Jie Li, Jie Zhang, Yang Qiu, Liangliang Zhang, Changle Liu, Xiang Gao
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 1 | January 2020 | Pages 70-77
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1610320
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The breeding material ratio (BMR) makes a significant impact on the tritium breeding ratio (TBR) to the fusion blanket due to the material fraction influence inside the blanket interior. The qualitative study on the BMR-related TBR issues are focused on the two cases of water-cooled blanket modules: the mixture blanket structure and the multilayer blanket case. The study indicates that TBR is a unique value in accordance with one BMR value in the mixture blanket. Moreover, a systematic scheme on TBR estimation based on multiple variable combinations is carried out for the multilayer model. It is found that the blanket local TBR would vary along with BMR increasing, and that high TBRs are obtained at BMR in the range of 0.08 to 0.12 for the two cases. In particular, the maximum TBR occurs when the BMR is in the range of 0.09 to 0.1. Furthermore, TBR variation due to BMR change induced by blanket macrofactors, like material type, material ratio, material structure, etc., is defined using the universal function solution. These results would be more important to the breeding blanket design and optimization since they would affect the blanket structure concepts and their TBR estimations. Hence, the blanket BMR issues are important concerns on the road toward an advanced blanket system for the Chinese Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR) at the present pre-engineering stages.
