Breeding Your Own Fuel

From the NovaLogic Blog · Fusion Energy, Engineered

The deuterium half of fusion fuel is easy: it is in seawater. The tritium half is the catch. Tritium is rare, short-lived, and not something you can stockpile in quantity.

The solution is built into the reactor. The fusion reaction releases neutrons, and a blanket of lithium surrounding the plasma turns those neutrons into fresh tritium. The plant breeds the fuel it consumes.

That same blanket does double duty. It absorbs the kinetic energy of the fusion neutrons as heat, and that heat is what ultimately drives a turbine and produces electricity. Without the blanket there is no power plant, only a physics demonstration.

NovaLogic treats blanket design as core engineering rather than an afterthought, because closing the fuel cycle and capturing the heat is what separates a reactor from a science experiment.