Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium
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Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium
#2Can't an operational fusion reactor breed tritium? If so we just need enough tritium to start one.
Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium
#3Can't an operational fusion reactor breed tritium? If so we just need enough tritium to start one.
The article covers that.
> Tritium breeding was originally going to be tested as part of ITER, but as costs ballooned from an initial $6 billion to more than $25 billion it was quietly dropped. Willms’ job at ITER is to manage smaller-scale tests. Instead of a full blanket of lithium surrounding the fusion reaction, ITER will use suitcase-sized samples of differently presented lithium inserted into “ports” around the tokamak: ceramic pebble beds, liquid lithium, lead lithium.
> Even Willms admits that this technology is a long way from being ready to use, however, and a full-scale test of tritium breeding will have to wait until the next generation of reactors, which some argue might be too late. “After 2035 we have to construct a new machine that will take another 20 or 30 years for testing a crucial task like how to produce the tritium, so how are we going to block and stop global warming with fusion reactors if we will not be ready until the end of this century?” says Mazzucato.
Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium
#4Can't an operational fusion reactor breed tritium? If so we just need enough tritium to start one.
The article covers that. > Tritium breeding was originally going to be tested as part of ITER, but as costs ballooned from an initial $6 billion to more than $25 billion it was quietly dropped. Willms’ job at ITER is to manage smaller-scale tests. Instead of a full blanket of lithium surrounding the fusion reaction, ITER will use suitcase-sized samples of differently presented lithium inserted into “ports” around the…
Oops missed that.
ITER is not necessarily the best approach to fusion, although it's the best funded.
In any case if we can't breed tritium than we either need to shoot for higher energy D-D fusion or some other reaction or fusion will never be cost-competitive.
Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium
#5> There are other ways of creating tritium but these techniques are too expensive to be used for the quantities required, and they will likely remain the reserve of nuclear weapons programs
Too expensive for clean power, just right to threaten the world
Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium
#6"Precious tritium is what makes this project go. There's only 25 pounds of it on the whole planet."
Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium
#7Tell that to the Sun. We already have a fusion reactor sufficient to meet all of humanity's energy needs, it's a gravitationally contained fusion reactor with a projected lifetime of at least one billion years, so why not just rely on that? Seems to have done wonders for the biosphere for the last one billion years, hasn't it?
Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium
#8"Precious tritium is what makes this project go. There's only 25 pounds of it on the whole planet."
What about in near earth asteroids?
Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium
#9"Precious tritium is what makes this project go. There's only 25 pounds of it on the whole planet."
Just to provide the other half of the concern around how little there is.
...it’s estimated that working fusion reactors will need up to 200 kg of it a year
Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium
#10Tell that to the Sun. We already have a fusion reactor sufficient to meet all of humanity's energy needs, it's a gravitationally contained fusion reactor with a projected lifetime of at least one billion years, so why not just rely on that? Seems to have done wonders for the biosphere for the last one billion years, hasn't it?
You are spot on. The world will be powered by renewables before fusion ever sees its first commercial watt produced.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31428469
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/05/16/a-fate-realized-1-tw-...