Production of Nuclear Battery $\beta^{-}$ Emitters Driven by Fusion Neutrons

TL;DR

This paper explores how future D-T fusion neutron sources could vastly increase the production of nuclear battery radioisotopes, enabling scalable, high-activity manufacturing.

Contribution

It demonstrates the potential for fusion neutron irradiation to produce key radioisotopes at unprecedented scales, including a self-sufficient tritium cycle for large-scale production.

Findings

Fusion neutrons can produce radioisotopes at rates many orders higher than current methods.

Certain feedstocks enable large-scale isotope production while closing the tritium fuel cycle.

Over one ton of ${}^{147}$Pm could be produced annually per gigawatt of fusion power.

Abstract

Nuclear batteries require radioisotopes with specific combinations of half-life, decay mode, and radiation properties, yet most candidate fuels lack scalable production routes. We show how the future availability of deuterium-tritium (D-T) fusion neutrons could enable manufacturing nuclear battery radioisotopes at many orders of magnitude higher rate than at present. We assess the capability of 14 MeV D-T fusion neutrons to produce nuclear battery radioisotopes by simulating feedstock material irradiation with neutrons. Promising radioisotope candidates include ${}^{147}$Pm, ${}^{63}$Ni, ${}^{39}$Ar, and ${}^{137}$Cs. Some feedstocks allow a radioisotope to be produced at scale while also closing the tritium fuel cycle, resulting in hundreds to over one thousand kilograms of high specific activity radioisotope per gigawatt thermal year of D-T fusion irradiation. We perform OpenMC simulations of an enriched ${}^{148}$Nd blanket for a tokamak, demonstrating that tritium self-sufficient designs can produce over one ton of ${}^{147}$Pm per gigawatt thermal year, equivalent to $\sim$one billion Curies per year of ${}^{147}$Pm. Operation of such a blanket would represent an unprecedented increase of nuclear battery radioisotope production capability.