Lancaster project to develop breeder materials for fusion

The funding is part of the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA)’s £200m Lithium Breeding Tritium Innovation (LIBRTI) programme.

Fusion power plants will rely on hydrogen isotopes deuterium (which can be extracted from seawater), and tritium (which is rare on Earth) to produce energy.

To address this scarcity, tritium must be produced (or ‘bred’) in a lithium-containing blanket that surrounds the fusion reaction. The LIBRTI programme aims to demonstrate controlled tritium breeding, which will be a critical step for future fusion power plants.

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UKAEA is funding 12 small-scale tritium breeding and digital simulation experiments including Lancaster’s Tritium Breeder (TriBreed) project, which is a collaboration with Oxford University and Kyoto Fusioneering.

TriBreed will design and fabricate a simple, reusable tritium breeding experiment that will demonstrate the ability to accurately predict the amount produced in banket designs. It will utilise advanced octalithium ceramic breeder materials and enable the demonstration of their breeding potential.

In a statement, Dr Samuel Murphy, director of Studies for Nuclear Engineering at Lancaster University and the principal investigator for TriBreed, said: “It is exciting for Lancaster to be part of the hugely ambitious LIBRTI programme. Our experiment will provide valuable data that will derisk LIBRTI and support development of a UK ceramic tritium breeder blanket.”

As part of this effort, UKAEA intends to purchase a neutron source from SHINE Technologies in the US which will form the backbone of a first-of-a-kind testbed facility to be built at Culham Campus in Oxfordshire.

John Norton, LIBRTI director at UKAEA, said: “The neutron source selected shall provide neutrons of the same energy as those emitted from a fusion machine, enabling LIBRTI to experiment with a wide range of materials and engineering configurations to shape and advance the breeding models required for next step blanket designs.”

Greg Piefer, CEO of SHINE Technologies, said: “Today, our systems are already achieving up to 50 trillion fusion reactions per second, which makes them the world’s brightest steady-state deuterium-tritium neutron sources. These fusion spectrum neutrons are essential to validate tritium breeding materials critical for scalable fusion energy systems.”