1/13/2024 0 Comments Fission uranium spitsITER is expected to consume most of the world’s tritium, leaving little for reactors that come after.įusion advocates often boast that the fuel for their reactors will be cheap and plentiful. “What we found matches predictions,” says Fernanda Rimini, JET’s plasma operations expert.īut that achievement could be a Pyrrhic victory, fusion scientists are realizing. By getting to one-third of this breakeven point, JET offered reassurance that ITER, a similar reactor twice the size of JET under construction in France, will bust past breakeven when it begins deuterium and tritium (D-T) burns sometime next decade. Last year, the Canadian tritium fueled an experiment at JET showing fusion research is approaching an important threshold: producing more energy than goes into the reactions. The reaction could provide abundant clean energy-just as soon as fusion scientists figure out how to efficiently spark it. When tritium is combined at high temperatures with its sibling deuterium, the two gases can burn like the Sun. At $30,000 per gram, it’s almost as precious as a diamond, but for fusion researchers the price is worth paying. This wasn’t ordinary hydrogen but its rare radioactive isotope tritium, in which two neutrons and a proton cling together in the nucleus. Inside each drum was a steel cylinder the size of a Coke can, holding a wisp of hydrogen gas-just 10 grams of it, or the weight of a couple sheets of paper. In 2020, Canadian Nuclear Laboratories delivered five steel drums, lined with cork to absorb shocks, to the Joint European Torus (JET), a large fusion reactor in the United Kingdom. A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 376, Issue 6600.
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