Fuel retention in tokamaks

Tritium retention constitutes an outstanding problem for ITER operation and future fusion reactors, particularly for the choice of the first wall materials. In present day tokamaks, fuel retention is evaluated by two complementary methods. The in situ gas balance allows evaluation of how much fuel is retained during a discharge and, typically, up to one day of experiments. Post-mortem analysis is used to determine where the fuel is retained, integrated over an experimental campaign. In all the carbon clad devices, using the two methods, the retention is demonstrated to be very closely related to the carbon net erosion. This results from plasma–wall interaction with ion and charge-exchange fluxes, ELMs and is proportional to the pulse duration. The fuel retention by implantation saturates at high wall temperatures and limits the D/C ratio in the deposited layers but, as far as a carbon source exists, the dominant retention process remains the co-deposition of carbon with deuterium. In full metallic device, in the absence of wall conditioning with boron, co-deposition is strongly reduced and fuel retention below 1% can be achieved. Extrapolation to ITER shows that removing the carbon from the plasma-facing components would increase the number of discharges to 2500 before reaching the maximum tritium limit of 700 g.