Overview of Tritium-Related Activities at ENEA Brasimone Research Center in Support of Fusion Reactor Development

This paper provides an overview of the tritium-related research activities conducted at the ENEA Brasimone Research Center, a leading facility in Italy dedicated to nuclear energy and fusion technologies. The Center’s fusion research mainly deals with the development of the Breeding Blanket (BB) within the ITER and DEMO projects, especially of the water-cooled lithium lead BB and related materials.In this context, a key focus is the study of tritium behavior in liquid-metal environments, with a range of experimental devices and setups designed to study the fundamental tritium transport properties of structural and functional materials, tritium permeation in the gas phase and in contact with water, tritium extraction from liquid lithium–lead, and tritium recovery from coolants, particularly from helium. Protium or deuterium are used as substitutes for tritium in these studies.Additionally, the research at ENEA Brasimone includes the development and validation of tritium transport models, which are essential for design and safety analyses of future fusion reactors. This paper presents the experimental infrastructures and the main recent achievements, emphasizing how these experimental devices and modeling efforts contribute to improving the design and efficiency of tritium breeding systems, which are essential for the sustainable operation of fusion reactors.