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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Fusion Science and Technology
October 2025
Latest News
DOE awards $134M for fusion research and development
The Department of Energy announced on Wednesday that it has awarded $134 million in funding for two programs designed to secure U.S. leadership in emerging fusion technologies and innovation. The funding was awarded through the DOE’s Fusion Energy Sciences (FES) program in the Office of Science and will support the next round of Fusion Innovation Research Engine (FIRE) collaboratives and the Innovation Network for Fusion Energy (INFUSE) awards.
Thomas F. Fuerst, Matthew D. Eklund, John A. Leland, Adriaan A. Riet, Chase N. Taylor
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 79 | Number 8 | November 2023 | Pages 1224-1234
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2023.2196237
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Tritium breeding is a critical component of any self-sustaining future fusion reactor. The liquid-metal eutectic PbLi is of particular interest as a tritium breeder material due to its favorable thermophysical and neutronic properties. One of the several remaining challenges facing PbLi breeder blankets is the need to design and validate a highly efficient tritium extraction system. The vacuum permeator is a promising extraction concept that utilizes tritium permeation through a highly permeable metal membrane. The Tritium Extraction eXperiment (TEX) is a forced-convection PbLi loop constructed to investigate tritium extraction from PbLi with vacuum permeators. Accurate thermal-hydraulic and tritium transport models are required to establish appropriate test matrices, predict experiment outcomes, and analyze data. However, the hydrogen transport properties of PbLi and permeator materials have large uncertainties. A database is collected and a parametric analysis is conducted on the effect of hydrogen transport material properties, including diffusivity of H in PbLi and the permeator, solubility of H in PbLi and the permeator, and the permeator surface recombination constant, on the expected tritium extraction efficiency for a vacuum permeator installed in TEX. Herein, we observe that the solubility of H in PbLi and the permeator and the recombination constant of the permeator have the largest effect on extraction efficiency.