Article from Chris Ecclestone - UK commodity analyst -...

Article from Chris Ecclestone - UK commodity analyst - Hallgarten monthly review

Tungsten & Nuclear Power
Most of the buzz these days in the nuclear power space is related to SMRs and with good reason, as the disastrous excursions in Europe into the addition to the nuclear fleet of full-scale plants have seen cost over-runs that exceed the GDP of small nations. This has been particularly the case in the UK. SMRs tick a large number of boxes, such as cost, flexibility and easier to define locations. Some have ventured that fusion reactors are the way to go. Progress is being made towards the development of nuclear fusion, which fuses atoms rather than splits them as in a conventional fission reactor. There is under construction in France, the International Experimental Fusion Reactor, which aims to be the first reactor that produces more energy than it consumes. At the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxfordshire, the Joint European Torus (JET), is the world’s largest operational magnetic confinement plasma physics experiment, intended to open the way to future nuclear fusion grid energy. Advocates for nuclear fusion claim that it has the potential to generate almost limitless, clean energy that is “too cheap to meter”. Research is being undertaken at the University of Huddersfield in the UK, investigating the role of Tungsten in this type of reactor.

Tungsten is a leading candidate for both plasma-facing and shielding in both spherical and D-shaped tokamaks (devices which use a powerful magnetic field generated by external magnets to confine plasma). This is due to its core properties, including high melting point, high thermal conductivity, high neutron shielding and low sputtering yield (loss of material when hit with energetic particles). Detractors claim that, by simulating the damage caused by high-energy neutrons and alpha particles produced during the fusion process, researchers have discovered that Tungsten is liable to become brittle, leading to failure. This is not to discount though that Tungsten alloys may achieve the desired outcome. If the planets align in favour of fusion reactors (and capital cost must be the deciding factor, rather than just operating cost) then a sizeable, and reliable, Tungsten supply chain would need to be established. The current Tungsten output is clearly not adequate in such a scenario therefore the industry would need to grow by an order of magnitude to achieve the roll-out of fusion reactors to afford economies of scale and move them from being a niche option to a mainstream alternative.