California-based TAE Technologies is attempting to build a fusion reactor that uses hydrogen and boron, which it says will be a cleaner and more practical alternative to D-T fusion. Back then, everything else seemed impossible.īut now, with the help of AI-controlled magnets to help confine the fusion reaction, and advances in materials science, some companies are exploring alternatives. These two elements were initially chosen because they fuse at a relatively low temperature-they’re the easiest things to work with, and it made sense in the early days of fusion. The tritium problem is fueling skepticism of ITER, and D-T fusion projects more generally. “We don’t want to get the car built and then run out of gas,” he says.
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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. There are other ways of creating tritium-actively inserting breeding material into nuclear fission reactors, or firing neutrons at helium-3 using a linear accelerator-but these techniques are too expensive to be used for the quantities required, and they will likely remain the reserve of nuclear weapons programs.
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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 tokamak: ceramic pebble beds, liquid lithium, lead lithium.
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Willms’ job at ITER is to manage smaller-scale tests. 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. “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. When a neutron escapes the reactor and hits a lithium-6 molecule, it should produce tritium, which can then be extracted and fed back into the reaction. Breeder technology aims to work by surrounding the fusion reactor with a “blanket” of lithium-6.
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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.
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“We’re hitting the peak of this tritium window roughly now.” “If ITER had been doing deuterium-tritium plasma like we planned about three years ago, everything kind of would have worked out fine,” says Scott Willms, fuel cycle division leader at ITER. We’re in that sweet spot right now, but ITER-running almost a decade behind schedule-isn’t ready to take advantage of it. In 1999, Paul Rutherford, a researcher at Princeton’s Plasma Physics Laboratory, published a paper predicting this problem and describing the “ tritium window”-a sweet spot where tritium supplies would peak before declining as heavy-water-moderated reactors were switched off.