Luciano M. Giancarli

TBM stands for Test Blanket Module. Within these test blankets, a viable technique will be exploited to ensure tritium breeding self-sufficiency, one of the major technological breakthroughs required for passing from ITER to the demonstration fusion power plant DEMO and finally to fusion power plants. "As there is no practical external source of tritium for fusion energy development beyond the Deuterium-Tritium plasma operation in ITER, the successful development of Tritium Breeding Blankets is essential for the whole mission of fusion power," Giancarli stresses. ITER will gain the 10 kilograms of Tritium that are foreseen over the entire lifetime of expected 20 years from external sources. But for DEMO with an expected electrical power output of 800 MW, about 300g of Tritium per day will be required