The Trouble with Tritium

Posted by Admin on Jul 15, 2006 at 01:02 AM
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Tritium is an isotope of hydrogen.  It’s a hydrogen atom with two additional neutrons:

“Wasserstoff” is the German word for “hydrogen”.  The stuff of water.

As noted in fuel for fusion reactions, the choice of deuterium and tritium as fusion fuel produces neutrons which generate heat, but also some radioactive waste. Not as much waste as occurs in nuclear fission reactions, but radioactive waste can be eliminated altogether by switching to hydrogen-boron fuel.

In addition to the radioactivity issue with using tritium for fuel, other drawbacks are as follows:

• Tritium is in short supply
• Tritium is used in nuclear weapons
• Other links

Tritium is in short supply

Is there enough tritium supply for conventional fusion development? This question and the following quotes appear in this paper on “Test Blanket Modules” found on the Columbia University Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics website. [See original paper]

  “The availability of tritium supply has been a central issue for the development of fusion energy. DT [deuterium-tritium] plasmas consume HUGE amounts of tritium, unprecedented in the history of mankind. This tritium cannot be provided for long from non-fusion tritium production sources.

“Tritium consumption in DT devices is 55.8 Kg per 1000 MW of fusion power per year. In contrast, the tritium supply available for fusion accumulated over 40 years of CANDU reactors operation will peak at 27 kg in the year 2027 and, if not consumed sooner, will decay at a rate of 5.47% per year.

  “Typical tritium production capacity from fission reactors specially designed for tritium production is only a few kg per year, and at the prohibitive cost of about $200 million dollars per kg.

  “It must be also clearly recognized that all DT experimental devices, and, of course, the DEMO and power plants, will have to breed their own tritium. This puts a premium on integrated testing of tritium breeding blanket concepts in ITER. Without a successful TBM [tritium breeding module] in ITER, the world will not have an adequate tritium supply for fusion energy development - an ironic consequence considering the fundamental promise of fusion as an “inexhaustible energy source”.

  “Therefore, it is of critical importance that the fusion program accelerates the development of breeding blankets now, including a serious TBM program on ITER, to ensure that tritium is available for fusion development and to ensure that the premise of the fusion energy development program is credible and attainable.”

The above excerpt relates to conventional fusion energy approaches involving the tokomak. Our Focus Fusion approach does not require tritium, and hence for us this issue is moot.

Tritium is used in nuclear weapons

This paper suggests that tritium reduction is a key step for global nuclear arms control.  Read More >>

Other Tritium Links:

Canada’s Tritium Exports Could Mushroom - 1990
Yes, this is a very dated article. Dear readers, Please let us know if you have more current/topical links. We are putting these here as food for thought and discussion.