“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. 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. “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. To make matters worse, tritium is also coveted by nuclear weapons programs, because it helps makes bombs more powerful-although militaries tend to make it themselves, because Canada, which has the bulk of the world’s tritium production capacity, refuses to sell it for nonpeaceful purposes. It costs $30,000 per gram, and it’s estimated that working fusion reactors will need up to 200 kg of it a year. These twin forces have helped turn tritium from an unwanted byproduct of nuclear fission that had to be carefully disposed of into, by some estimates, the most expensive substance on Earth.
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