Tritium proof-of-principle pellet injector results

The tritium proof-of-principle (TPOP) experiment was built to demonstrate the feasibility of forming solid tritium pellets and accelerating them to high velocities for fueling future fusion reactors. The TPOP used a pneumatic pipe-gun with a 4-mm-i.d. and a 1-m-long barrel. Nearly 1500 pellets were fired by the gun during the course of the experiment; about a third of these were tritium or mixtures of deuterium and tritium. The system also contained a cryogenic ³He separator that reduced the ³He level to <0.005%. Pure tritium pellets were accelerated to 1400 m/s. Experiments evaluated the effect of cryostat temperature and fill pressure on pellet size, the production of pellets from mixtures of tritium and deuterium, and the effects of aging on pellet integrity. The tritium phase of the experiments was performed at the Tritium Systems Test Assembly (TSTA) at Los Alamos National Laboratory. About 100 kCi of tritium was processed through the apparatus without incident