5 ms·

Would that mean that you wouldn't need titium to start with? Or that tritium deposits would replenish? How would it affect the rough calculations above?

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> Would that mean that you wouldn't need titium to start with? Tritium decays in a decade. To start, you'd need the expensive stuff harvested from the heavy water of spent fuel pools. After that, you'd let your neutrons breed it in lithium (or boron, if you're fancy).
- panosfilianos 4y ago
  So, the approach here would be that it would just be a much more efficient process.
wernercd 4y ago
I would also wonder if Titium is that expensive... and it generates titium... would that be part of the "break even" equation? Creating something rare to sell?
- Kubuxu 4y ago
  It is so rare because tritium is not found in nature in any significant quantity. The amount on the market comes from water recovered from water pools used for spent nuclear material storage. There also is no enormous market for tritium. So in short, fusion reactors exist on both sides of the tritium market, by becoming the primary producers and consumers of it, which should lead to significant drop in price of tritium.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  Current demand is a couple hundred grams per year. We just don't need that much of it. The cost per gram would go down a lot if we needed to mass-produce it.
  - panosfilianos 4y ago
    I think what I'm alluding to is, how much can the cost go down. In the case of fossil fuels there value is strongly based on their physical scarcity and cost of extraction/delivery etc. How much do these things ring true in this case and what are ideas of improvement?
creato 4y ago
Your calculations don’t mention energy (J), only power (MW in your post). Fuel supply and cost correlate with energy produced, not power. Parent post suggests that tritium is a fixed cost, more like a construction cost than a fuel cost. We can’t answer this question without a lot more information. We’d need to know how much tritium is needed to reach the point the reactor breeds more than it consumes, if at all.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago

> Would that mean that you wouldn't need titium to start with? Tritium decays in a decade. To start, you'd need the expensive stuff harvested from the heavy water of spent fuel pools. After that, you'd let your neutrons breed it in lithium (or boron, if you're fancy).

panosfilianos 4y ago
So, the approach here would be that it would just be a much more efficient process.

wernercd 4y ago

I would also wonder if Titium is that expensive... and it generates titium... would that be part of the "break even" equation? Creating something rare to sell?

Kubuxu 4y ago
It is so rare because tritium is not found in nature in any significant quantity. The amount on the market comes from water recovered from water pools used for spent nuclear material storage. There also is no enormous market for tritium. So in short, fusion reactors exist on both sides of the tritium market, by becoming the primary producers and consumers of it, which should lead to significant drop in price of tritium.
ceejayoz 4y ago
Current demand is a couple hundred grams per year. We just don't need that much of it. The cost per gram would go down a lot if we needed to mass-produce it.
- panosfilianos 4y ago
  I think what I'm alluding to is, how much can the cost go down. In the case of fossil fuels there value is strongly based on their physical scarcity and cost of extraction/delivery etc. How much do these things ring true in this case and what are ideas of improvement?

creato 4y ago

Your calculations don’t mention energy (J), only power (MW in your post). Fuel supply and cost correlate with energy produced, not power. Parent post suggests that tritium is a fixed cost, more like a construction cost than a fuel cost. We can’t answer this question without a lot more information. We’d need to know how much tritium is needed to reach the point the reactor breeds more than it consumes, if at all.