Part 2 of 3 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
     Tritium once was a useless byproduct of nuclear fission that had to be carefully disposed of. The two major problems mentioned above have helped turn tritium into one of the most expensive substances on Earth. It now costs about thirty thousand dollars per gram. It is estimated that a working tokamak fusion reactor will need about four hundred and forty pounds of tritium a year.
     To make matters worse, tritium is also required to enhance the explosive power of hydrogen bombs. Now, militaries in nations with nuclear arsenals make their own tritium. There are about twelve thousand nuclear warheads in the world. Each needs to be refreshed every twelve years with four grams of tritium. If one twelfth of the warheads are refreshed each year, that means that about nine pounds of tritium are needed each year. At 30,000 dollars per gram, this amounts to about thirty million dollars needed each year for nuclear warhead maintenance. Canada which has the bulk of the world’s tritium production capacity will not sell tritium for nonpeaceful purposes.
     Paul Rutherford was a researcher at Princeton’s Plasma Physics Laboratory. In 1999, he published a paper predicting this tritium supply problem, referring to it as the “tritium window”. He said that this window was a sweet spot where the tritium supplies would peak before declining as heavy-water moderated reactors were turned off because their operational lifespans had passed. The world is currently in the Rutherford sweet spot. Unfortunately, ITER is too far behind schedule to take advantage of it. Scott Willms is the fuel cycle division leader at ITER. He said, “If ITER had been doing deuterium-tritium plasma like we planned about three years ago, everything kind of would have worked out fine. We’re hitting the peak of this tritium window roughly now.”
     Researchers have known about this potential problem with tritium supplies for decades. They developed an effective solution. This solution would use nuclear fusion reactors to “breed” tritium. The fusion reactors would end up replenishing their own fuel at the same time as they burn it. Breeder technology would function by surrounding the fusion reactor with a “blanket” of lithium-6.
     When a neutron escapes the reactor and hits a lithium-6 molecule in the blanket, it should produce tritium. The new tritium could then be extracted and fed back into the reaction.  Stuart White is a spokesperson for the UK Atomic Energy Authority, which hosts the JET fusion project. He said, “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.”
     Originally, tritium breeding was going to be tested as part of ITER. But as the ITER construction costs rose from an initial estimate of six billion dollars to over twenty-five billion dollars, the tritium breeding was cut from the project. Willms’ job at ITER will be to manage smaller scale tests. Instead of a full-scale blanket of lithium-6 wrapped around the fusion chamber, ITER will utilize suitcase-sized samples of differently presented lithium inserted into “ports” surrounding the fusion chamber in the tokamak. Some of the tests will involve ceramic pebble beds, liquid lithium and lead lithium.
Please read Part 3 next