Tritium System Design Considerations for a Basic Fusion Ignition Experiment

This paper outlines the preliminary conceptual design of a minimum—cost tritium system for a basic ignition experiment whose objective is to produce and control fusion ignited plasmas for scientific study. A system without tritium recycling and tritium reprocessing is envisioned. The fueling requirements can be satisfied by using a tritium storage tank with 20 kCi absorbed in a uranium bed which will be delivered to the facility every month (about 100 ignition pulses). Fueling needs will be supplied by thermal heating of the uranium bed and subsequent gas puffing of the tritium into the tokamak vacuum vessel. A modular vacuum pumping system is considered (6 × 880 ℓ/sec). Tritiated liquid effluents are eliminated by using oilless—bearing pumps. A thin carbon film is applied by glow discharge over the first wall to contain the tritium in the plasma chamber (by saturating the C film). The overall cost of the tritium system is estimated to be less than $3 million.