Part 3 of 3 Parts (Please read Parts 1 and 2 first)
     There are other ways of creating lithium-6 such as actively inserting breeding materials into nuclear fission reactors or firing neutrons at helium-3 targets using a linear accelerator. Unfortunately, these techniques are too expensive to be used in the quantity needed for commercial fusion reactors. They will be used for nuclear weapons production. The best route to commercial fusion would be to launch a more ambitious program for developing breeding technology in parallel to ITER. This way, there may be sufficient tritium being produced to fuel ITER when it is switched on in 2035. Willms said, “We don’t want to get the car built and then run out of gas.”
      The tritium problem is fueling skepticism of ITER and D-T fusion projects in general. These two isotopes of hydrogen were chosen because they fuse at a relatively low temperature. This made sense in the early days of fusion research. However, with help of AI-controlled magnets to help confine the fusion reaction as well as advances in materials science, some companies are exploring alternatives.
     TAE Technologies is based in California. They are attempting to build a fusion reactor that uses hydrogen and boron. They say that it will be a cleaner and more practical alternative to D-T fusion. TAE intends to reach a net energy gain where a fusion reactor creates more power than it consumes by 2025. Boron can be extracted from seawater by the metric ton. It has the added benefit of not irradiating the reactor as the D-T fusion reaction does. TAE Technologies CEO Michl Binderbauer said that their approach is more commercially viable to scalable fusion power than tokamaks burning D-T fuel.
     Helion Energy in the Seattle area is taking a very different approach to fusion. It is an inertial confinement system as opposed to a tokamak. Tiny pellets of fuel are injected into the fusion chamber and then hit with a beam of light generated by a bank of lasers. Their fusion reactor burns deuterium and helium-3. As was mentioned above, deuterium is easy to produce from seawater. While helium-3 is very rare on Earth, it will be recycled in their reactors so supply should not be a problem. One of the benefits of their system is the fact that it does not produce neutrons which would irradiate the metal used in construction. Another benefit is that it will not require a steam turbine system to turn fusion generated energy into electricity.
     The mainstream fusion community is still focusing on ITER for achieve practical fusion, in spite of the potential problems with tritium fuel. Willms said, “Fusion is really, really difficult, and anything other than deuterium-tritium is going to be 100 times more difficult. A century from now maybe we can talk about something else.”
     Billions of dollars are being poured into fusion research. There are at least a dozen companies working on small fusion reactors of different designs using different fuels. Many of them intend to have commercial prototypes operating before 2030. It may very well be that ITER will be too much too late. It is possible that it will be upstaged by working fusion reactors before it is even completed.