Capstone spotlight: Breeding tritium with EX-Fusion
How one capstone team helped pioneer the future of clean energy
One kilogram of tritium costs about $35 million in the United States. Why? Because it has the potential to both power a nation, and destroy it.
While a majority of North America’s tritium supply is focused on the latter — bolstering the United States’ nuclear weapons stockpile — EX-Fusion Inc. is using it for the former — clean energy. Under the direction of US Operations Manager Max Monange, four Berkeley MEng students were able to contribute to that goal.
EX-Fusion is a Japan-based fusion energy startup that is working to build and power the first laser-powered commercial nuclear fusion reactor. According to their website, the company was founded on the belief that this kind of nuclear fusion has the potential to provide “safe, clean, and inexpensive energy” that can be used to power the advancement of civilization.
After graduating from the Berkeley MEng program with a master’s degree in nuclear engineering and leveraging his background in entrepreneurship, Monange was hired as the first nuclear engineer at EX-Fusion to lead US Operations and brought their reactor research and development to the United States.
“I initially pushed to have a capstone team because I knew we could definitely leverage some talented students,” Monange said. “I know the quality of the program for nuclear engineering at UC Berkeley… (and) we have the diversity of engineering talent at Berkeley because not only can I recruit from the nuclear engineering department, I can recruit from other departments.”
Following a tedious interview and selection process, Monange chose four students across a variety of engineering disciplines: Angel Plaza Carreras [ME], Benjamin James Li [NE], Claire Elizabeth Garlington [MSE], Jack Fiske Kirkwood [NE].
The students were tasked with designing and simulating a self-cooled lithium-lead blanket (SCLL), a large spherical device circulating liquid metal that breeds tritium through nuclear fusion reaction using the lithium present in the metal.
Though tritium is vital to the reaction, it is not naturally occurring and must be created in a nuclear fission power plant, an accelerator, or a fusion blanket. Hence, the team must ensure the reaction is producing more tritium than it is using. Without this guarantee, the entire future of fusion is at risk.
Using their varying areas of expertise, the team designed the reactor blanket and simulated the reaction to see how much tritium they could breed.
Once they had their design, the team worked with Oak Ridge National Laboratory to translate their computer-aided design (CAD) into the simulation.
Monange secured a partnership with the lab in February after presenting the project at a conference, a collaboration he said was crucial to the success of the project.
“I think it’s something major that hasn’t happened in any other capstone project — working with an industry company and a national lab plus UC Berkeley,” Monange said. “That was a cool collaboration that we had for… quite a novel project.”
At the conclusion of the project, the team also had the opportunity to travel to the EX-Fusion offices in Japan to present their findings, exchange ideas, and tour their laser facilities.
“Obviously, this is good for a talent pipeline too,” Monange added. “We’re interested in potentially recruiting some of the students that we have trained for so long — almost a year — so that was a good way to establish the first connection between the US team and the Japan team.”
Their final presentation was back at UC Berkeley for the Fung Institute End of Year Showcase. There, Jack Fiske Kirkwood reflected on the project, admiring how he was able to build both technical expertise and leadership skills that are applicable to much of the field.
More broadly, he said, he was proud to have contributed to much-needed research.
“Currently, there’s a huge need for this kind of work to be done and to be published publicly so that we have the data and methodologies out there for either people to continue this work,” Kirkwood said, “but also for people to continue to research and continue to improve on our methods so that when we get to the point where we have successful and repeatable ignition for fusion, we can immediately turn that into power generation and stop producing carbon emissions.”
Connect with Max Monange, Angel Plaza Carreras, Benjamin James Li, Claire Elizabeth Garlington, and Jack Fiske Kirkwood.
Written by Veronica Roseborough, Fung Institute Digital Marketing Intern.
