TARGET PRODUCTION FOR INERTIAL FUSION ENERGY

Inertial fusion energy (IFE) power plants will require the ignition an d burn of five to ten fusion fuel targets every second. The technology to economically mass produce high-quality precision targets at this r ate is beyond the current state of the art. Techniques that are scalab le to high production rates, however have been identified for all the necessary process steps, and many have been tested in laboratory exper iments or are similar to current commercial manufacturing processes. A baseline target factory conceptual design is described, and its capit al and operating costs are estimated. The result is a total production cost of similar to 16c/target. At this level, target production repre sents similar to 6% of the estimated cost of electricity from a 1-GW(e lectric) IFE power plant. Cost scaling relationships are presented and used to show the variation in target cost with production rate and pl ant power levels.