12 hours ago
UK firm achieves tritium breakthrough, could boost nuclear fusion fuel supply
Astral Systems, a UK-based private commercial fusion company, has claimed to have become the first firm to successfully breed tritium, a vital fusion fuel, using its own operational fusion reactor.
This achievement, made with the University of Bristol, addresses a significant hurdle in the development of fusion energy.
The milestone came during a 55-hour Deuterium-Deuterium (DD) fusion irradiation campaign conducted in March. Scientists from Astral Systems and the University of Bristol produced and detected tritium in real-time from an experimental lithium breeder blanket within Astral's multi-state fusion reactors.
"There's a global race to find new ways to develop more tritium than what exists in today's world – a huge barrier is bringing fusion energy to reality," said Talmon Firestone, CEO and co-founder of Astral Systems.
"This collaboration with the University of Bristol marks a leap forward in the search for viable, greater-than-replacement tritium breeding technologies. Using our multi-state fusion technology, we are the first private fusion company to use our reactors as a neutron source to produce fusion fuel."
Astral Systems' approach uses its Multi-State Fusion (MSF) technology. The company states this will commercialize fusion power with better performance, efficiency, and lower costs than traditional reactors.
Their reactor design, the result of 25 years of engineering and over 15 years of runtime, incorporates recent understandings of stellar physics.
A core innovation is lattice confinement fusion (LCF), a concept first discovered by NASA in 2020. This allows Astral's reactor to achieve solid-state fuel densities 400 million times higher than those in plasma.
The company's reactors are designed to induce two distinct fusion reactions simultaneously from a single power input, with fusion occurring in both plasma and a solid-state lattice.
The reactor core also features an electron-screened environment. This design reduces the energy needed to overcome the Coulomb barrier between particles, which lowers required fusion temperatures by several million degrees and allows for higher performance in a compact size.
The ability to generate tritium within the reactor is crucial. A sustainable fusion energy system needs to produce more fuel than it consumes. This development shows a path toward solving that engineering challenge.
In this regard, the latest breakthrough has broad and major implications for several industries, including nuclear fusion energy.
'As we progress the fusion rate of our technology, aiming to exceed 10 trillion DT fusions per second per system, we unlock a wide range of applications and capabilities, such as large-scale medical isotope production, fusion neutron materials damage testing, transmutation of existing nuclear waste stores, space applications, hybrid fusion-fission power systems, and beyond,' remarked the company.
Professor Tom Scott, who led the University of Bristol's team, supported by the Royal Academy of Engineering and UK Atomic Energy Authority, concluded, "We're now pushing to quickly optimise our system to further enhance our tritium breeding capability."
'This landmark moment clearly demonstrates a potential path to scalable tritium production in the future and the capability of Multi-State Fusion to produce isotopes in general.'
