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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

#61

Post by jandrese »

tlb wrote: post #35
areoform wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’re facing a catastrophe. I and others have described elsewhere that the path we’re on is much, much worse than even the most dire of predictions the IPCC makes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30947756 Teller et al anticipated your objection. It’s why the reactor is supposed to dig into sold rock. If there’s a catastrophic failure then it’s yet another subsurface nuclear test. And the more advanced designs co…

The same line of reasoning says that we should build conventional light- or heavy-water reactors. The risk is minimal. And they're (a) tested and (b) much cheaper than PACER.

The advantage of a PACER setup is that you get a lot more bang (heh) per kg of uranium than you do out of a fission reactor. But the cost of uranium is not currently a problem with our fission reactors. We do have a problem with radioactive waste, but even that is way more political than it is technical.

I wonder which two senators are going to be ok with detonating 32 bombs in their state every day? This isn't the 50s, NIMBYs know how to make your life a living hell when trying to do anything nuclear.

Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium

#62

Post by fallingknife »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #39
gfodor wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like every fusion post is bound to have at least one commenter point out that the sun is a working fusion reactor, as if literally anyone in these threads will learn something from this observation.

Roughly $50 billion has been spent globally on fusion research since the 1950s with nothing material to show for the effort; at what point do you stop throwing good money after bad? This strikes me as the learning from these posts.

Intel has a capex budget of $27 billion just for 2022, so you don't really understand scale or have a point.

Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium

#63

Post by AustinDev »

Goronmon wrote: post #9
Victerius wrote: post #6

"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

The working fusion reactors will produce enough to not need additional tritium, it is a self-sustaining reaction after all.

Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium

#64

Post by toomuchtodo »

fallingknife wrote: post #62
toomuchtodo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Roughly $50 billion has been spent globally on fusion research since the 1950s with nothing material to show for the effort; at what point do you stop throwing good money after bad? This strikes me as the learning from these posts.

Intel has a capex budget of $27 billion just for 2022, so you don't really understand scale or have a point.

Intel has working products, customers, shareholders, and fundamentally, accountability for that research spend. Results driven research funding is not unreasonable, unless you want to classify this research in the same vein as particle accelerators and a curiosity with no expectation of success (which is fine; just don’t sell as an energy silver bullet where there’s no evidence it can be delivered on). Hope is not a strategy nor a cost justification.

Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium

#65

Post by dhosek »

>in, … 12.3 years…, half of the tritium available today will have decayed into helium-3.

When I saw this, I thought that sounded odd, shouldn’t the atomic number go down with radioactive decay? but it turns out that in this case what happens is one of the neutrons splits into a proton, an electron and an electron neutrino so the atomic number goes up by one (unlike the more familiar fission reactions of the heavier elements where the atomic number decreases). So much physics I’ve either forgotten or never learned.

Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium

#66

Post by tedd4u »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #39
gfodor wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like every fusion post is bound to have at least one commenter point out that the sun is a working fusion reactor, as if literally anyone in these threads will learn something from this observation.

Roughly $50 billion has been spent globally on fusion research since the 1950s with nothing material to show for the effort; at what point do you stop throwing good money after bad? This strikes me as the learning from these posts.

I think you make an excellent point that fusion research is underfunded. NASA budget since the 50s is ~$1,400 billion — almost 30x what’s been put into fusion research. We’re asking fusion research to produce “free, clean, and carbon-free base-load electricity forever.” Seems worth a NASA-level of investment to me.

Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium

#67

Post by 99_00 »

theptip wrote: post #58

> “It would be an absurdity to use dirty fission reactors to fuel ‘clean’ fusion reactors,” This seems like a non-sequitur. If we need to keep around (or even build) a few heavy-water fission plants to enable the fusion industry, what's the problem? The simple phrasing of fission as "dirty" really shows the quotee's biases. You could easily envision a stable energy mix with a few percent of fission, the rest fusion a…

There's a lot of bad thinking in that one sentence.

All or nothing. We must have completely clean power or it has no value.

Not using comparison. How does it compare to other sources of energy, (including solar which is built in facilities using coal power).

Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium

#68

Post by somenewaccount1 »

Title is extremely misleading.

> "Right now, the tritium used in fusion experiments like ITER, and the smaller JET tokamak in the UK, comes from a very specific type of nuclear fission reactor called a heavy-water moderated reactor."

You litterally just need to make more of these heavy-water moderated reactors, which are rare and approaching end of life, but certainly you can build more of them if it was the difference between having endless energy or not.

Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium

#69

Post by gitfan86 »

westcort wrote: post #59

My key takeaways: * In a perfect world, there would be a more ambitious program developing the breeding technology in parallel to ITER, Willms says, so that by the time ITER has perfected the fusion reactor there’s still a fuel source to run it * Like many of the most prominent experimental nuclear fusion reactors, ITER relies on a steady supply of both deuterium and tritium for its experiments * When it’s finally fu…

Last week Elon explained that the problem of fusion is that it will be more expensive than solar and wind.

Re: Nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium

#70

Post by [deleted] »

howenterprisey wrote: post #22

If anyone was wondering if SPARC and ARC care about this, SPARC onsite tritium inventory is planned to be fairly low: just 10 grams (not kg) in this 2018 SPARC paper[0]. I would also speculate that 200 kg/year sounds a little bit too high, although I can't find an ARC paper to corroborate (the magic words you want are "total on-site tritium inventory"). [0] https://www1.psfc.mit.edu/research/alcator/pubs/APS/APS2018/…

[deleted]
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