A tritium catalytic fusion reactor concept

The performance of deuterium targets with small tritium seeding is analysed. The objective is to take advantage of the features of fusion reactivity ratios for very high burning temperatures in order to minimize tritium needs and to reduce the ignition temperature as much as possible. It is found theoretically and computationally that there is a regime for deuterium-tritium DTx plasmas (with x ∼ 0.03) where the final content of tritium in the pellet debris is the same as the initial contents in the original pellet. No external blankets to breed tritium would thus be needed. Although energy gains are limited because of the small fusion yield of DD reactions, the energy gain of DTx targets is higher than that of pure deuterium plasmas. The ignition temperature and the driver energy are lower than the corresponding values of DD pellets. This concept is also very useful to reduce the tritium inventory and to simplify the complexity of inertial fusion reactors which use stoichiometric DT. (author)