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"Precious tritium is what makes this project go. There's only 25 pounds of it on the whole planet."
by Victerius 4y ago
"Precious tritium is what makes this project go. There's only 25 pounds of it on the whole planet."
- rmdashrfstar 4y agoWhat about in near earth asteroids?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dodobirdlord 4y agoTritium has a half-life of about 12 years, meaning that it essentially doesn’t exist naturally. It’s all man made.
- Goronmon 4y agoJust 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
- AustinDev 4y agoThe working fusion reactors will produce enough to not need additional tritium, it is a self-sustaining reaction after all.
- ceejayoz 4y ago> There's only 25 pounds of it on the whole planet. "Because we haven't needed more until now, and it's mostly man-made." There wasn't any plutonium on Earth, either, until we decided we needed some.
- adrian_b 4y agoActually, when the Earth was formed, it contained a non-negligible quantity of plutonium (supernovae produce all the elements until Z=100, much over the Z=94 of plutonium, but the heavier elements had already decayed before the interstellar dust reached the nascent Solar System). Because the longest-lived isotope of plutonium has a half-life close to 100 million years, so some 45 halvings have happened since the Earth formation, almost all primordial plutonium has decayed by now. A few atoms of the primordial plutonium are still around us, though they are much too few to be easily detectable (there have been claims that some very sensitive experiments have detected them).