CBE Seminar: Yaset Acevedo

Fusion Power for Chemical Engineers: Enabling Commercial Fusion Through Tritium Fuel Cycle Engineering

Abstract

The successful commercialization of fusion energy requires more than achieving fusion reactions in a plasma. Future fusion power plants must operate closed fuel cycles capable of recovering, purifying, recycling, and breeding tritium while maintaining stringent safety, environmental, and inventory controls. As a result, many of the critical challenges facing commercial fusion lie squarely within the domain of chemical and process engineering.

This seminar provides an overview of magnetic confinement fusion and examines the tritium fuel cycle from a chemical engineering perspective. Topics include hydrogen isotope chemistry, tritium-material interactions, isotope separation, detritiation technologies, process safety, and the development of integrated fuel cycle architectures for fusion power plants. Examples from Type One Energy's stellarator-based Project Infinity and ongoing fuel cycle modeling efforts will illustrate the application of process simulation, separations technology, and systems engineering to fusion plant design.

The talk will highlight opportunities for chemical engineers to contribute to emerging fusion technologies through advances in mass transfer, separations, catalysis, electrochemical systems, process modeling, materials engineering, and environmental stewardship. By framing fusion as a fuel cycle and process systems challenge rather than solely a plasma physics problem, this talk will demonstrate the essential role chemical engineers will play in enabling practical fusion energy.