karlnite t1_iyvm70b wrote
Reply to comment by MortalPhantom in Why not use hydrogen and deuterium in fusion reaction rather than tritium and deuterium? by Curious_user4445
Canadian nuclear plants pay millions a year to remove tritium from our cooling and moderator water. It’s a pesky problem and we are always looking for ways to get rid of tritium. We currently keep barrels upon barrels of our most tritiated water sitting around to decay off so we can use the deuterium content again safely one day. We would pay fusion companies to take our tritium away. They could set up a device to harvest it from our reactors or waste just like we do for the global supply of medical isotopes currently. We have determined a myriad of medical isotopes that could be harvested, we just need investors willing to set up the systems to harvest them who have connections to medical companies that can utilize the isotopes (our industry doesn’t have the experience to do this all ourselves as we make power and that is hard enough). I don’t see why we couldn’t do that for tritium too.
NetworkLlama t1_iywq9xk wrote
There's probably not as much tritium in that water as you think. According to this paper on sourcing tritium, a 700 MW CANDU-6 reactor can make only about 130 grams of tritium per year. There probably aren't dozens of kilograms of tritium sitting in those barrels.
karlnite t1_iywuaul wrote
That’s very likely, I have not done the math to calculate to mass of tritium in the systems.
Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments