Conversion rate

The title of this article is ambiguous. Further meanings are listed under Conversion rate (disambiguation) .

This article or the following section is not adequately provided with supporting documents ( e.g. individual evidence ). Information without sufficient evidence could be removed soon. Please help Wikipedia by researching the information and including good evidence.

In nuclear technology, the conversion rate is the ratio of the number of new fissile atomic nuclei that are created in a nuclear reactor to the nuclei that are simultaneously consumed by fission. Another term, which is rarer in the specialist literature, is the conversion ratio .

Conversion rates of up to 0.7 are achieved in light water reactors . Breeder reactors are designed to achieve conversion rates above 1.0, i.e. to produce more fuel than they consume. With them, the conversion rate is usually referred to as the breeding rate (more rarely breeding ratio ).

In large-scale operations, nuclear fusion reactors will also have to produce a component of their fuel, tritium , from lithium . Here, too, the breeding rate denotes the ratio of the newly produced to the consumed tritium nuclei.