Power plant design for inertial confinement fusion: Implications for pellets

Potential commercial applications of inertial fusion include the production of electricity and fissile and chemical fuels. In all these applications, a significant amount of high-temperature heat will be produced and converted to electricity. Most of the implications for fusion pellets are common to all applications; the emphasis in this discussion is on central station electric power plants. The requirements and constraints on fusion pellets for power plant applications include: survivability in hostile reaction chamber environments, the ability to withstand large acceleration forces encountered in high-velocity injection, sufficiently large energy releases for economic power production, and high-rate automated manufacture at costs whch are not a large fraction of the value of the fusion energy released.