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Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium

wired.co.uk

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Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium

#11

Post by cpuguy83 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #3
api wrote: post #2

Can'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…

$25 billion... thinking about how much money we've dedicated for active warfare in the last 2 months alone... clearly we have our priorities.

Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium

#12

Post by areoform »

Just a quick reminder, we already have practical fusion with tens of thousands of years of runway available to us today. We choose not to do it because it sounds dangerous and it’s not politically expedient.

For those unfamiliar, I am talking about Project PACER. The fusion reactor proposed by Teller after the creation of the thermonuclear weapon. It may sound fanciful but it’s based on a simple precept. We can already induce fusion reactions, albeit in an unstable and explosive fashion. What if we took that warhead, surrounded it with a giant underground chamber made out of steel several feet thick, and let it explode while molten fluoride captured the heat?

Their work conclusively shows that this can be done, and that molten fluoride salts could capture most of the neutrons to prevent embrittlement. A single such facility could power the entire country. Oh and it could be configured to create Tritium in the process.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_PACER

The project was terminated because it was "bound to be controversial" and would "arouse considerable negative responses."

The math is sound. The concepts are sound. We could solve the comparatively minor engineering challenges and build one today while waiting on the the breakthrough needed for controlled, continuous fusion.

Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium

#14

Post by fffobar »

areoform wrote: post #12

Just a quick reminder, we already have practical fusion with tens of thousands of years of runway available to us today. We choose not to do it because it sounds dangerous and it’s not politically expedient. For those unfamiliar, I am talking about Project PACER. The fusion reactor proposed by Teller after the creation of the thermonuclear weapon. It may sound fanciful but it’s based on a simple precept. We can alrea…

Isn't the problem that the fuse for a fusion bomb is a fission bomb, and a fission bomb very violently disperses lots of radioactive material? What am I not getting?

Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium

#15

Post by G3rn0ti »

I thought the end game was aneutronic fusion using lithium and deuterium anyway creating only charged particles instead of high energy neutrons that are dangerous and damaging to the reactor. If nuclear fusion ever wants to be commercially viable, it must not depend on tritium.

Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium

#16

Post by BurningFrog »

ceejayoz wrote: post #3
api wrote: post #2

Can'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…

I'm very unimpressed by the "we must only consider short term solutions to global warming" idea.

We don't know the future, and we keep being surprised by it!

Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium

#17

Post by jszymborski »

I'm not sure about the scale here, but is it really as crazy as the article says to use tritium that is formed from fission? What's the ratio of fusion:fission energy you'd need? I can't imagine even if it was 50% or 25% that it wouldn't be worth doing seeing as you'd just be fuelling a clean energy source from the waste stream of another energy source that doesn't produce CO2.

Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium

#18

Post by nh23423fefe »

photochemsyn wrote: post #7

Tell 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?

Instead of asking oblique rhetorical questions, you could actually make a meaningful statement.

Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium

#19

Post by WheatM »

areoform wrote: post #12

Just a quick reminder, we already have practical fusion with tens of thousands of years of runway available to us today. We choose not to do it because it sounds dangerous and it’s not politically expedient. For those unfamiliar, I am talking about Project PACER. The fusion reactor proposed by Teller after the creation of the thermonuclear weapon. It may sound fanciful but it’s based on a simple precept. We can alrea…

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