Nuclear Waste Could Help Power Future Fusion Reactors

A critical shortage of fuel for nuclear fusion reactors may have a rather counterintuitive solution.

Could dirty nuclear help power clean nuclear?

The dream of fusion power has been around for decades and there are numerous inter-government and private enterprises endeavouring to make it a reality. When, hopefully, it is achieved it would be an unprecedented revolution, providing humanity with, for all practical purposes, unlimited clean energy available on demand. However, there is a problem. It's called tritium. And it's incredibly rare.

The potentially good news is that a physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) says that fusion reactor fuel could be made from nuclear waste from fission reactors.

To try a resolve the problem of tritium's scarcity, NewAtlas reports that Terence Tarnowsky of Los Alamos has been running simulated reactor designs with a view to using the thousands of tonnes of nuclear waste from fission reactors as a source of tritium.

"Energy transitions are a costly business, and anytime you can make it easier, we should try," said Tarnowsky. He recently presented his results at a meeting of the American Chemical Society.

Meanwhile, late last year, the world’s biggest operational experimental nuclear fusion reactor - a technology in its infancy but billed by some as the answer to humanity’s future energy needs - was inaugurated in Naka, Japan. And, in Europe, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) - nearly 40 years in the making - has announced that its most complex component is now ready for assembly.

However, it's too early to get our hopes up that the world is about to start enjoying fusion generated clean power. ITER estimates the reactor’s first plasma date at around 2035. But once this gargantuan machine of human ingenuity is complete, we will have truly bottled a star - or, at least, a close approximation of it. We just have to keep our fingers crossed that it actually works.