I’m not sure about that. Tritium is produced in very small amounts in nuclear reactors. We don’t really have a natural source for it - the only natural tritium on Earty is produced in miniscule amounts in the upper atmosphere.
All the reactors in the US only produced 225 kg of Tritium from 1955 to 1996. Most of it has decayed away, leaving about 75 kg.
If fusion is supposed to replace fission reactors, we would be shutting down our source of tritium.
The fusion reactors themselves are the source of the tritium. Lithium is put in the reactor lining, and it gets split into tritium and helium. The shortage is with regard to the development. Which is yet another problem with giant reactors like ITER.
If everything goes to plan, it’s just a short-term issue, and if needed they can spin up some expensive method of breeding it. But that depends on everything working.
This is covered in the article:
For Abdou and his colleagues, it is more than a challenge—it may well be an impossibility. Their analysis found that with current technology, largely defined by ITER, breeding blankets could, at best, produce 15% more tritium than a reactor consumes. But the study concluded the figure is more likely to be 5%—a worrisomely small margin.
One critical factor the authors identified is reactor downtime, when tritium breeding stops but the isotope continues to decay. Sustainability can only be guaranteed if the reactor runs more than 50% of the time, a virtual impossibility for an experimental reactor like ITER and difficult for prototypes such as DEMO that require downtime for tweaks to optimize performance. If existing tokamaks are any guide, Abdou says, time between failures is likely to be hours or days, and repairs will take months. He says future reactors could struggle to run more than 5% of the time.
Nuclear-fusion power-plant technology development has now been taken over by AI, so this thread has now become superfluous. Please redirect your search to ‘machine learning’. And don’t be careful. Just kidding about being careful.
‘Historic’ fusion power deal targets 500MW plant for US steelmaking by 2030
US metals giant Nucor to invest $35m to help Helion develop big facility for breakthrough nuclear tech
US steel giant Nucor said it aims to have one of its facilities running on fusion power as soon as 2030 in what’s being billed as a landmark deal for the much-vaunted nuclear technology.
Nucor and fusion start-up Helion will collaborate to develop a 500MW plant providing baseload zero-carbon power to one of the steelmaker’s sites, the two said on Wednesday.
“Nucor and Helion are working together to set a firm timeline and are committed to beginning operations as soon as possible with a target of 2030,” said the partners in what they claimed as a “historic” industrial collaboration.
PS. I didn’t realize fusion research was so cheap–a $35 million investment is considered significant.
That seems…optimistic.
Not at all optimistic; just give them ten years and they’ll have it working.
I have seen the mini series that did a great job explaining what happened at Chernobyl, and I have just finished seeing the mini series about the nuclear disaster at fukushima daiichi. My questions are these: Are the dangers the same, similar, or different in any way from the dangers at those facilities? Would the solutions be the same or different? How do they compare?
Fusion is very different from fission. The same issues do not exist for Fusion.
It is 7 years from 2023 to 2030.
Sure, but I’m allowing for unexpected delays.
I’m pretty sure I remember you writing that in the 1950s.
Serious answer but I believe even fission plants can be designed to be much safer and make meltdowns impossible.
Different style plant I take it? The traditional plants are impossible to make so meltdowns are impossible. Even the US Navy reactors can meltdown.
Are you talking about maybe the pebble-bed reactors or something?
Of course most plants are far less likely to meltdown than Chernobyl thankfully.
Yes, pebble-bed designs are one way to make fission plants safer.
Reactors that use coolant fluid as a moderator cannot melt down, because if the coolant leaks out the reaction automatically shuts down.
Also, modern reactors like CANDU can burn waste from older style US reactors, and in so doing reduce the length of dangerous radioactivity from tens of thousands of years to a few hundred.
It is absolutely insane that the U.S. reactors run fuel through them once, leaving 95%+ of the useful fissionable material in the waste, then storing it in casks onsite. Other countries that reprocess their nuclear waste do not have the waste problem the US has.
You can thank Jimmy Carter for that one - he signed an executive order banning reprocessing in the US. Reagan repealed it, but by then no new reactors were really being built. Between 1977 and 2013 not a single new US reactor was constructed. A big issue was the disposal of waste, which didn’t have to be an issue at all.
Meltdowns occur because all you need to do to get a nuclear chain reaction going with uranium is to pile a bunch of it next to each other. There has been at least one completely natural nuclear “reactor” of sorts just because there was enough uranium in one spot to get the reaction going.
If a fission reactor goes kablooey it’s very easy to end up with a bunch of fuel right next to each other so that it can sustain a reaction. In a fusion reaction, you’re fusing hydrogen into helium. Hydrogen doesn’t melt into a puddle. If you get to the kablooey stage, the hydrogen just escapes out into the atmosphere (which causes its own issues) but the reaction naturally stops. The only way to get an uncontrolled fusion reaction out of hydrogen is if you have enough of it to roughly create several Jupiter-sized planets. Once you get that much hydrogen in one place, gravity alone will start the reaction. You can’t get a natural fusion reaction on Earth like you can a natural fission reaction with uranium.
Fusion reactions also don’t create piles (or puddles) of horrendously toxic radioactive waste.
That doesn’t mean a fusion plant can’t have accidents. Since we don’t have a practical fusion plant yet it’s difficult to predict all of the ways a fusion plant can spontaneously disassemble itself. And just because hydrogen floats off into the atmosphere instead of pooling into a radioactive puddle that continues to react doesn’t mean there’s no radiation in a fusion plant. Fusion reactions emit high energy neutrons which bombard the atoms around them and produce radioactive elements. Again, since we don’t have a working plant yet, which materials will be used in the plant and exactly what types of radioactive materials will be produced is just guesswork.
Fusion reactions also produce ionizing radiation which can harm or kill plant workers and emergency response personnel in the event of an accident.
I love this engineering turn of phrase.
The other big issue, which is what prompted Jimmy Carter to sign that order, was that India made a nuclear device in 1974 using reprocessed nuclear waste. The ban on reprocessing was specifically intended to make it more difficult for the bad guys to make big kaboom devices.
The biggest problem with fusion utility-scale power is that it doesn’t exist. It may not ever be feasible. Or we might figure out how to make fusion power at scale, but not cost-effectively. It’s all unknowns at this point, and it’s been that way for 50 years. Progress is being made, but we don’t know yet how to get to the endpoint of utility scale fusion power.
Therefore, the responsible thing to do right now is to ignore it for the purposes of planning out a near or medium future energy grid. If fusion power were to achieve net breakeven tomorrow (it’s not close), it’d still take decades to develop and prove out large power plants based on it.