Reply To: Global Warming

[Henning]

Li+n -> T (plus anything else) is just the process described in the paper to produce tritium easily. Sellafield may have produced heaps of tritium, but the half life of tritium is just 12 years. That means in fifty years the tokomaks are going to be productive, none of the tritium is left.

That’s the point, you need fission reactors to feed D-T-fusion reactors. And uranium is exhausted in maybe 30 years, but you can’t store the tritium.

And thorium? Well a nice idea, I don’t know much about it. Maybe ten times better than uranium and ten times more abundant (whatever, I don’t really care at the moment). This makes it as much of a problem as uranium before: same amount of waste. But there’s no way of storing that waste safely (exception: the Swedes have a tectonic safe granite vault, but they won’t let anybody else dump their rubbish there).

So same problem with thorium as with uranium: heaps of uncontrollable waste.