Tritium Inventory Management
Tritium is bred, burned, stored, and lost continuously; accounting for every gram in real time is a safety and operations requirement.
Why it matters
Tritium is the scarce fuel of a D-T plant and a regulated radioactive material. Knowing how much is where, at all times, is required for both operation and safety. The plant must breed enough to sustain itself and to start later units, while never holding more than is safe or losing track of any.
The tritium cycle
- Bred in the blanket by neutron capture.
- Extracted and purified for fuel.
- Injected into the plasma, where a fraction burns.
- Recovered from exhaust and recycled; some decays or permeates away.
Accounting in real time
A tritium accounting model tracks flows and inventories across every subsystem, reconciled against measurements. It is part of the digital twin and feeds directly into safety and licensing, where accountancy of special nuclear-adjacent materials is scrutinized.
Losses and decay
Tritium decays with a half-life of about 12.3 years and permeates through hot metals, so some is always lost. The model must include decay and permeation to keep the books honest, and those loss terms feed back into the breeding ratio requirement.
Hyperion context
The Hyperion breeder targets a breeding ratio of 1.8 partly to build the startup inventory for subsequent units. Inventory management is what turns that ratio into a scheduled, auditable fuel supply across a fleet.
Honest uncertainty
Permeation and extraction efficiencies are uncertain, so inventory estimates carry error bars, carried through uncertainty analysis and reflected in conservative operating limits.