Making Fusion Energy Fuel And Building Fuel Injection Systems For Commercial Fusion Energy Machines

The Fusion Report continues its series on the challenges commercial fusion energy must overcome, this time examining fusion fuel and the systems that inject it into fusion machines. Despite claims that fusion fuel is essentially free, a hypothetical 1GW deuterium-tritium plant would burn roughly 100 grams of deuterium and 150 grams of tritium per day, with tritium costing roughly $30,000 per gram today, or about $1.6B per year, until breeding is proven. Even with breeding, the lithium-6 consumed annually would run roughly $20M per year, and the initial fill of a breeder blanket with 40 to 100 metric tons of enriched lithium could cost $1.6B to $4B at today’s prices. The article also compares fueling approaches across machine types: inertial fusion machines fire cryogenic D-T pellets at 1 Hz or faster, magnetic fusion machines inject D-T gas that is heated into a continuously fueled plasma, and hybrid systems such as Helion’s Polaris accelerate two plasma clouds into each other.