228
submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

One study suggested that the reactors could produce more nuclear waste than current systems and that they "will use highly corrosive and pyrophoric fuels and coolants that, following irradiation, will become highly radioactive."

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

If we could use the tritium that would be helpful, it's limited on earth and our only known source off world is in lunar regolith. Plus it's part of the fuel needed to begin a fusion reaction.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

It's not a lot of it and isolating it is more trouble than it's worth. It's easier to just create a lithium channel that creates it when it's neutron activated. That or isolating it from a heavy water reactor, since that produces a whole lot more.

Tritium isn't scarce, in that we really can create it pretty easily. Lithium-6 is available to do so if needed. (https://isotope.com/en-us/lithium-6-metal-li-95-pct-llm--827--pk). It's jut not economical to produce for most purposes.

Edit: Also, it's not tritium in the regolith but He3, which is theorized as an aneutronic (thus much cleaner and not creating a bunch of neutron activation waste like tritium fusion would create) fusion fuel but nobody's really achieved fusion with it. Tritium would've decayed if it was in the regolith.

When you let tritium decay, it creates He3.

this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2023
228 points (97.5% liked)

World News

32075 readers
774 users here now

News from around the world!

Rules:

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS