According to a report from the American Chemical Society (ACS) press office on August 18, as cited by TASS, scientist Terence Tarnowski from Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) has proposed processing spent nuclear fuel (SNF) in a special breeder reactor to extract tritium required for the operation of future thermonuclear reactors. Using SNF as raw material could significantly reduce the cost of this hydrogen isotope.
Tarnowski stated that the current price of tritium is approximately $33 million per kilogram. The United States has no tritium production facilities, and the market supply of this heavy hydrogen isotope is in short supply.
He explained that tritium is a key element of fuel for future fusion power plants. The total global reserves of tritium amount to hundreds of kilograms, while a fusion power plant with a capacity of 1 gigawatt would require about 55 kilograms of tritium per year.
This forces scientists to search for new methods of tritium production, such as utilizing neutron interactions with lithium-6 atoms inside fusion reactors or producing tritium through the decay of fission elements in conventional nuclear reactors. A large portion of the tritium currently used in scientific experiments is produced this way, but the output is insufficient to meet the future demands of fusion power generation.
In light of these circumstances, Tarnowski proposed the concept of a special breeder reactor. In this reactor, spent nuclear fuel would be irradiated by a particle beam generated by a relatively low-power particle accelerator. The particles interact with unstable atoms, causing atomic decay and producing a neutron flux. This neutron flux interacts with other particles to generate a large number of tritium atoms.
Tarnowski currently estimates that such a facility could produce about 2 kilograms of tritium per year, equivalent to the total tritium output of all Canadian reactors, which is approximately ten times higher than the theoretical yield from adding lithium-6 to fusion reactors under similar energy consumption conditions. This approach has promising commercial prospects.
