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Nuclear Fusion Is Already Facing a Fuel Crisis - Wired.co.uk

Nuclear Fusion Is Already Facing a Fuel Crisis - Wired.co.uk

Nuclear Fusion Is Already Facing a Fuel Crisis - Wired.co.uk
May 20, 2022 1 min, 41 secs

Like many of the most prominent experimental nuclear fusion reactors, ITER relies on a steady supply of both deuterium and tritium for its experiments.

And as ITER drags on, years behind schedule and billions over budget, our best sources of tritium to fuel it and other experimental fusion reactors are slowly disappearing.

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.

But this is not a viable long-term solution—the whole point of nuclear fusion is to provide a cleaner and safer alternative to traditional nuclear fission power.

“It would be an absurdity to use dirty fission reactors to fuel ‘clean’ fusion reactors,” says Ernesto Mazzucato, a retired physicist who has been an outspoken critic of ITER, and nuclear fusion more generally, despite spending much of his working life studying tokamaks.

It has a half-life of 12.3 years, which means that when ITER is ready to start deuterium-tritium operations (in, as it happens, about 12.3 years), half of the tritium available today will have decayed into helium-3.

Scientists have known about this potential stumbling block for decades, and they developed a neat way around it: a plan to use nuclear fusion reactors to “breed” tritium, so that they end up replenishing their own fuel at the same time as they burn it.

“Calculations suggest that a suitably designed breeding blanket would be capable of providing enough tritium for the power plant to be self-sufficient in fuel, with a little extra to start up new power plants,” says Stuart White, a spokesperson for the UK Atomic Energy Authority, which hosts the JET fusion project.

“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.

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