TPOP-II: Tritium fueling at a reactor scale

As part of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) plas ma fueling development program, Oak Ridge National Laboratory has fabricate d a pellet injection system to test the mechanical and thermal properties o f extruded tritium. This repeating single-stage, pneumatic, Tritium-Proof-o f-Principle Phase II (TPOP-II) Pellet Injector has a piston-driven mechanic al extruder and is designed to extrude and accelerate hydrogenic pellets si zed for the ITER device. Tritium and deuterium-tritium (D-T) pellets have b een produced in experiments at the Los Alamos National Laboratory Tritium S ystems Test Assembly. About 38 g of tritium was used in the experiment. Thi s paper presents results of the TPOP-II extrusion experiments. These extrus ion experiments indicate that both T-2 and D-T will require higher extrusio n forces than D-2 by about a factor of 2 and that the flow of the material may be characterized by static and dynamic shear strengths.