I saw mention of this somewhere else - perhaps on a Youtube video I never linked to? - but there's an article in Science which makes it clear that it is a very serious problem for the prospects of fusion as a viable energy source:
A shortage of tritium fuel may leave fusion energy with an empty tank
Fusion advocates often boast that the fuel for their reactors will be cheap and plentiful. That is certainly true for deuterium: Roughly one in every 5000 hydrogen atoms in the oceans is deuterium, and it sells for about $13 per gram. But tritium, with a half-life of 12.3 years, exists naturally only in trace amounts in the upper atmosphere, the product of cosmic ray bombardment. Nuclear reactors also produce tiny amounts, but few harvest it.
Most fusion scientists shrug off the problem, arguing that future reactors can breed the tritium they need. The high-energy neutrons released in fusion reactions can split lithium into helium and tritium if the reactor wall is lined with the metal. Despite demand for it in electric car batteries, lithium is relatively plentiful.
But there’s a catch: In order to breed tritium you need a working fusion reactor, and there may not be enough tritium to jump-start the first generation of power plants. The world’s only commercial sources are the 19 Canada Deuterium Uranium (CANDU) nuclear reactors, which each produce about 0.5 kilograms a year as a waste product, and half are due to retire this decade. The available tritium stockpile—thought to be about 25 kilograms today—will peak before the end of the decade and begin a steady decline as it is sold off and decays, according to projections in ITER’s 2018 research plan.
The article does mention that there are other fusion fuels theoretically possible, but require something like ten (ok, seven) times the heat to work:
TAE Technologies, a California startup, plans to use plain hydrogen and boron, whereas Washington state startup Helion will fuse deuterium and helium-3, a rare helium isotope. These reactions require higher temperatures than D-T, but the companies think that’s a price worth paying to avoid tritium hassles. “Our company’s existence owes itself to the fact that tritium is scarce and a nuisance,” says TAE CEO Michl Binderbauer.
The alternative fusion reactions have the added appeal of producing fewer or even no neutrons, which avoids the material damage and radioactivity that the D-T approach threatens. Binderbauer says the absence of neutrons should allow TAE’s reactors—which stabilize spinning rings of plasma with particle beams—to last 40 years. The challenge is temperature: Whereas D-T will fuse at 150 million degrees Celsius, hydrogen and boron require 1 billion degrees.
I know it is risky to ever bet against technological advances - but on the other hand, someone in the 1940's who pooh-poohed a science fiction magazine's cover showing flying car highways in the sky in the 21st century would be looking prescient.
Hence, I'm strongly tempted to bet against fusion ever being a viable energy source, in any century.
Total dead letter. Waste of time. People get sucked into it because they believe that Einstein jive about matter converting to energy. Well what type of energy? It has to be either heat or electricity. Heat to cause phase change of water to turn a steam turbine, or some kind of stream of protons to generate electricity. A complete waste of time. Plus its not clear that the depiction of the hydrogen bomb is an honest one. It came out the same month or at least time period, as the erroneous depiction of stars running on fusion, so this can be seen as the same disinformation campaign and not like two separate mistakes.
ReplyDeleteThe deep state creates and exacerbates the problem of "economic rent" and then seeks to own the resource that the economic rent has been attached to, or at least create debt against it. So these guys are always damaging our energy supply. One of the best ways to damage energy is to send investment dollars to energy sources that are never going to work. Like solar for the grid. Always going to be trouble. Fusion is another of these investment funnels. There is one type of "fusion" that might work and it involved boron. Even there one doubts it will work very well since it relies on a proton stream which is likely to be pitiful. But looking into the detail its not really fusion its fission.
ReplyDeleteWe know what is going to work and its not solar or fusion. Okay off-grid floating solar could be useful. Remote solar for the batteries for remote electric fences is a good thing. The things that will work are thorium nuclear. And using that energy also to make hydrocarbons. The transport solutions involve rail, rail and more rail and in the next century, if we prepare for it, canals. Rail lines with overhead wires for trolley cars. It worked great in the 1920's and it can work great for a long time to come wherever you have fairly flat ground.
Now we know all this. But the deep state needs to have us energy deficient to create their artificial economic rent. So they keep sending people down horrendously expensive rabbit trails, and one of these is the battery fetish. This horrible battery fetish. Not even a Sadoway battery fetish either, which could be helpful. But this totally irrational rare-earths battery fetish that has consumed everyone at Quiggins place and elsewhere.
"TAE Technologies, a California startup, plans to use plain hydrogen and boron, whereas Washington state startup Helion will fuse deuterium and helium-3, a rare helium isotope."
ReplyDeleteWhich of these two should be written off as close to insane in the first instance? Obviously the one where you are going for rare substances. If you want things dirt cheap you must make them with dirt. (Thats why fibre optics is a solution for the ages since it is made from silicon and oxygen, the most abundant elements in the earths crust.)
Anything to do with helium 3 should be an off-planet undertaking and only if we find out we can use helium 3 as a store of energy, when we have access to the endless electrical energy that the solar wind, and the inner solar system, provides us with. So if these guys aren't planning this in conjunction with a space-based electrical satellite, what they are doing is borderline insane and amounts to a deep state investment funnel.
The boron and hydrogen thing is likely to be the fission-in-disguise version It could work. In a sane world that one would be subsidised a very modest amount over a long period of time. It would just be one of these projects that you don't know if it will pay off at all, so you'd hand these guys 5000 dollars a day to work on it over very long periods of time.
Whereas the second one is either just insane or being conducted in the wrong century. Unless there is some kind of secret space program that no-one knows about.