6 ms·

Will they provide the tritium required to bridge the gap to fusion? Canada provides almost all the world supply, but it's from stockpiles iirc. Once fusion is u

Will they provide the tritium required to bridge the gap to fusion? Canada provides almost all the world supply, but it's from stockpiles iirc. Once fusion is up and working, it can generate its own tritium, but ITERs tritium generation experiment has been massively scaled back, so we need more from nuclear reactors. see https://www.science.org/content/article/fusion-power-may-run-fuel-even-gets-started https://www.science.org/content/article/fusion-power-may-run... for more info.

BbzzbB 4y ago
>Once fusion is up and working That's one gargantuan "once", let's plan our energy generation assuming it doesn't materialize, we can always recalibrate if it does.
- samatman 4y ago
  The pace of change in the last fifteen years has been nonlinear. Let's not take it for granted, for sure, but let's maybe dial back on the "fusion is always 20 years away" jokes. There isn't a bigger win for civilization than fusion, leaving aside unknowns: immortality might be possible, fusion was our only source of energy until the discovery of fission.
  - acidburnNSA 4y ago
    Yeah but make sure to read the Voodoo Fusion article along the way. https://vixra.org/pdf/1812.0382v1.pdf https://vixra.org/pdf/1812.0382v1.pdf
    - Gud 4y ago
      Interesting how it excludes the most promising fusion start ups, especially Commonwealth Fusion Systems. What is the point of addressing the challenges fusion face when the best contenders are completely ignored? CFS are betting that the new breed of super conducting magnets(REBCO) will make fusion commercially viable. Beyond that, their reactor design is basically from the 50s. Tried and true design + modern materials = success? See Prof. Dennis Whyte, one of the of cofounders of CFS explain why he believes that fusion is coming sooner than you might think. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4
      - acidburnNSA 4y ago
        Do they have any fusion neutrons or a power conversion plant yet? Don't think so.
  - serial_dev 4y ago
    There were no jokes, a comment said that "let's plan our energy generation assuming it doesn't materialize, we can always recalibrate if it does". I hope you will allow people still being sceptical and cautious about counting on fusion for at least another 20-30 years. The progress that the physicists and engineers made is tremendous and I appreciate everyone's sacrifices to make fusion a viable energy source. However, it isn't one yet and likely it won't be for decades. There are still plenty of engineering challenges, and once those are solved, comes the economical, bureaucratical challenges (just take a look at how bad most countries are in building new fission reactors). Both can be true at the same time. I don't know about you, but I am planning my life with the assumption that the energy I use won't be coming from fusion for the rest of it (and I am around 30).
    - samatman 4y ago
      There's little downside in taking the pessimistic side of a bet with an enormous payout on the optimism side. I'm on the optimism side of that coin though. It's by no means necessary for a joke to have been made in the comment I was replying to, for me to refer to it. The cliché is well known.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    Immortality with our meat based brains has so much working against it, it might as well be impossible.
    - samatman 4y ago
      It was a pretty load-bearing "might", agreed.
- adrianN 4y ago
  Eh, fusion is two or three major construction projects away. We're very confident that ITER and DEMO will work. Of course funding has been abysmal, so they might be overtaken by projects that, for example, use better superconductors. That being said, fusion will come too late to do something about climate change, so we should be building renewables as quickly as we can, and, if we have too much money, perhaps add a bit of nuclear.
  - 7952 4y ago
    Even if the experiments succeed that could still be a long way from a plant that is commercially viable.
    - adrianN 4y ago
      Well, many people argue that _fission_ is not commercially viable without socializing at least some of the cost, and yet we're reading articles about new fission plants. If you think about it, fossil fuels aren't commercially viable either, a large part of the costs (global warming...) are socialized.
      - Cryptoclidus 4y ago
        Coal, oil and Natural gas recieve 5.9 TRILLION dollars a YEAR according to the IMF. That's a lot of hydro, wind, wave, solar and nuclear power potential. Fossil fuel companies are parasites.
  - Gwypaas 4y ago
    The question with fusion I never see answered is: "How do we convert the heat to electricity?" If the answer is steam then fusion is as dead as coal and nuclear. Or is there some solid state like solar or very non-complex working method like a wind turbine which is the target?
    - sushibowl 4y ago
      The answer is always steam turbines, because nothing else approaches the practical efficiency of steam turbines when it comes to converting heat to electrical power.
perihelions 4y ago
Canada's *deuterium-moderated* reactors are responsible for the world's tritium supply. This isn't that; this is the wrong type of fission reactor. - "If not for CANDU reactors, D-T fusion would be an unattainable dream. “The luckiest thing to happen for fusion in the world is that CANDU reactors produce tritium as a byproduct,” Abdou says. Many nuclear reactors use ordinary water to cool the core and “moderate” the chain reaction, slowing neutrons so they are more likely to trigger fission. CANDU reactors use heavy water, in which deuterium takes the place of hydrogen, because it absorbs fewer neutrons, leaving more for fission. But occasionally, a deuterium nucleus does capture a neutron and is transformed into tritium." - "If too much tritium builds up in the heavy water it can be a radiation hazard, so every so often operators send their heavy water to the utility company Ontario Power Generation (OPG) to be “detritiated.” OPG filters out the tritium and sells off about 100 grams of it a year, mostly as a medical radioisotope and for glow-in-the-dark watch dials and emergency signage. “It’s a really nice waste-to-product story,” says Ian Castillo of Canadian Nuclear Laboratories, which acts as OPG’s distributor."
- noisy_boy 4y ago
  I find the volume interesting. "Whats your annual yield?" "100 grams...." I wonder if there are other elements being produced and sold that have such low yearly yields. Bonus points if they are super expensive.
  - techdragon 4y ago
    I think there's probably quite a few "commercially valuable" isotopes (since Tritium is just good old Hydrogen with extra neutrons) that have similar low yearly yield, but I would honestly expect most of them are for medical or industrial imaging or upstream inputs to those industries. In some cases the half lives of the isotopes are so short they literally have to be produced on demand at a facility nearby, which usually means they can only be produced/used by facilities with their own equipment for producing them, or they are colocated on some sort of larger campus where they happen to have a suitable isotope producing accelerator as their neighbour. Fluorine-18 is used in certain kinds of PET scans for cancer imaging, and has a half life of 109 minutes! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorine-18 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorine-18 Technetium-99m is one of the most commonly used radioisotopes for medical imaging and has a half life of just over 6 hours https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technetium-99m https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technetium-99m so the usual mechanism is to ship the material that decays into Technetium-99m because the Molybdenum-99 parent isotope has a half life of 66 hours so lives long enough you can actually ship usable amounts around. So while this one is obviously not a low yield isotope, it really shows how the half life of the isotope can be worked around to make an an isotope a useful product. Its a little hard to give simple numbers for a lot of these since they get measured by "activity" in Becquerels (Bq) as that's the useful metric based on how they get used, so giving "mass" would involve a lot of math and some guesses based on how efficient supply chains are (since you might produce twice as much and just "eat the difference" letting it decay if you have no other good way to get it to the user faster) but its a very fascinating industry. Theres some fascinating information about how this sort of stuff gets made https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/te_1340_web.pdf https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/te_1340_web.p... if you want to find out just how "fiddly" it can be to do chemistry with elements that might just decide to change what they are while you're working with them.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ncmncm 4y ago
There will be no commercially competitive Tokamak fusion power. It would cost >10x fission, which is already not competitive, and gets less so every day. Total worldwide annual production of tritium is under 10 kg. It is just barely possible Helion could succeed someday.

BbzzbB 4y ago

>Once fusion is up and working That's one gargantuan "once", let's plan our energy generation assuming it doesn't materialize, we can always recalibrate if it does.

samatman 4y ago
The pace of change in the last fifteen years has been nonlinear. Let's not take it for granted, for sure, but let's maybe dial back on the "fusion is always 20 years away" jokes. There isn't a bigger win for civilization than fusion, leaving aside unknowns: immortality might be possible, fusion was our only source of energy until the discovery of fission.
- acidburnNSA 4y ago
  Yeah but make sure to read the Voodoo Fusion article along the way. https://vixra.org/pdf/1812.0382v1.pdf https://vixra.org/pdf/1812.0382v1.pdf
  - Gud 4y ago
    Interesting how it excludes the most promising fusion start ups, especially Commonwealth Fusion Systems. What is the point of addressing the challenges fusion face when the best contenders are completely ignored? CFS are betting that the new breed of super conducting magnets(REBCO) will make fusion commercially viable. Beyond that, their reactor design is basically from the 50s. Tried and true design + modern materials = success? See Prof. Dennis Whyte, one of the of cofounders of CFS explain why he believes that fusion is coming sooner than you might think. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4
    - acidburnNSA 4y ago
      Do they have any fusion neutrons or a power conversion plant yet? Don't think so.
- serial_dev 4y ago
  There were no jokes, a comment said that "let's plan our energy generation assuming it doesn't materialize, we can always recalibrate if it does". I hope you will allow people still being sceptical and cautious about counting on fusion for at least another 20-30 years. The progress that the physicists and engineers made is tremendous and I appreciate everyone's sacrifices to make fusion a viable energy source. However, it isn't one yet and likely it won't be for decades. There are still plenty of engineering challenges, and once those are solved, comes the economical, bureaucratical challenges (just take a look at how bad most countries are in building new fission reactors). Both can be true at the same time. I don't know about you, but I am planning my life with the assumption that the energy I use won't be coming from fusion for the rest of it (and I am around 30).
  - samatman 4y ago
    There's little downside in taking the pessimistic side of a bet with an enormous payout on the optimism side. I'm on the optimism side of that coin though. It's by no means necessary for a joke to have been made in the comment I was replying to, for me to refer to it. The cliché is well known.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  Immortality with our meat based brains has so much working against it, it might as well be impossible.
  - samatman 4y ago
    It was a pretty load-bearing "might", agreed.
adrianN 4y ago
Eh, fusion is two or three major construction projects away. We're very confident that ITER and DEMO will work. Of course funding has been abysmal, so they might be overtaken by projects that, for example, use better superconductors. That being said, fusion will come too late to do something about climate change, so we should be building renewables as quickly as we can, and, if we have too much money, perhaps add a bit of nuclear.
- 7952 4y ago
  Even if the experiments succeed that could still be a long way from a plant that is commercially viable.
  - adrianN 4y ago
    Well, many people argue that _fission_ is not commercially viable without socializing at least some of the cost, and yet we're reading articles about new fission plants. If you think about it, fossil fuels aren't commercially viable either, a large part of the costs (global warming...) are socialized.
    - Cryptoclidus 4y ago
      Coal, oil and Natural gas recieve 5.9 TRILLION dollars a YEAR according to the IMF. That's a lot of hydro, wind, wave, solar and nuclear power potential. Fossil fuel companies are parasites.
- Gwypaas 4y ago
  The question with fusion I never see answered is: "How do we convert the heat to electricity?" If the answer is steam then fusion is as dead as coal and nuclear. Or is there some solid state like solar or very non-complex working method like a wind turbine which is the target?
  - sushibowl 4y ago
    The answer is always steam turbines, because nothing else approaches the practical efficiency of steam turbines when it comes to converting heat to electrical power.

perihelions 4y ago

Canada's *deuterium-moderated* reactors are responsible for the world's tritium supply. This isn't that; this is the wrong type of fission reactor. - "If not for CANDU reactors, D-T fusion would be an unattainable dream. “The luckiest thing to happen for fusion in the world is that CANDU reactors produce tritium as a byproduct,” Abdou says. Many nuclear reactors use ordinary water to cool the core and “moderate” the chain reaction, slowing neutrons so they are more likely to trigger fission. CANDU reactors use heavy water, in which deuterium takes the place of hydrogen, because it absorbs fewer neutrons, leaving more for fission. But occasionally, a deuterium nucleus does capture a neutron and is transformed into tritium." - "If too much tritium builds up in the heavy water it can be a radiation hazard, so every so often operators send their heavy water to the utility company Ontario Power Generation (OPG) to be “detritiated.” OPG filters out the tritium and sells off about 100 grams of it a year, mostly as a medical radioisotope and for glow-in-the-dark watch dials and emergency signage. “It’s a really nice waste-to-product story,” says Ian Castillo of Canadian Nuclear Laboratories, which acts as OPG’s distributor."

noisy_boy 4y ago
I find the volume interesting. "Whats your annual yield?" "100 grams...." I wonder if there are other elements being produced and sold that have such low yearly yields. Bonus points if they are super expensive.
- techdragon 4y ago
  I think there's probably quite a few "commercially valuable" isotopes (since Tritium is just good old Hydrogen with extra neutrons) that have similar low yearly yield, but I would honestly expect most of them are for medical or industrial imaging or upstream inputs to those industries. In some cases the half lives of the isotopes are so short they literally have to be produced on demand at a facility nearby, which usually means they can only be produced/used by facilities with their own equipment for producing them, or they are colocated on some sort of larger campus where they happen to have a suitable isotope producing accelerator as their neighbour. Fluorine-18 is used in certain kinds of PET scans for cancer imaging, and has a half life of 109 minutes! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorine-18 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorine-18 Technetium-99m is one of the most commonly used radioisotopes for medical imaging and has a half life of just over 6 hours https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technetium-99m https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technetium-99m so the usual mechanism is to ship the material that decays into Technetium-99m because the Molybdenum-99 parent isotope has a half life of 66 hours so lives long enough you can actually ship usable amounts around. So while this one is obviously not a low yield isotope, it really shows how the half life of the isotope can be worked around to make an an isotope a useful product. Its a little hard to give simple numbers for a lot of these since they get measured by "activity" in Becquerels (Bq) as that's the useful metric based on how they get used, so giving "mass" would involve a lot of math and some guesses based on how efficient supply chains are (since you might produce twice as much and just "eat the difference" letting it decay if you have no other good way to get it to the user faster) but its a very fascinating industry. Theres some fascinating information about how this sort of stuff gets made https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/te_1340_web.pdf https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/te_1340_web.p... if you want to find out just how "fiddly" it can be to do chemistry with elements that might just decide to change what they are while you're working with them.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ncmncm 4y ago

There will be no commercially competitive Tokamak fusion power. It would cost >10x fission, which is already not competitive, and gets less so every day. Total worldwide annual production of tritium is under 10 kg. It is just barely possible Helion could succeed someday.