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UK firm achieves first commercial tritium breakthrough for fusion fuel
(interestingengineering.com)
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Things that fit:
Things that don't fit
I clearly don't understand the fusion process. Deuterium is used to fuse and create tritium?
What's this "electron screened environment" they are talking about? They can't purge all electrons from molecules when they enter can they? That would make the molecule instable. But it sounds like they are doing something similar in order to reduce the temperature required for fusion.
Anti Commercial-AI license
Produce more fuel than it consumed... I'm pretty sure that's breaking a law somewhere... And not the human kind...
It produces more rare tritium fuel than it uses from other fuels that it consumes. So in theory as long as you keep supplying the common fuel you get the tritium you need for the higher power reactions.
Any element below iron is technically fuel for fusion.
Yes, but assuming the system has 100% perfect efficiency (which is impossible) it'll only produce the same amount of fuel each time, not more than was put inside.
Problem also is that fusing becomes progressively more difficult the heavier the element gets, requiring more energy to create the fusion. So really, if we're looking at a perfect efficiency, and consider the potential energy from the entire process until fusion isn't possible anymore, you'll only ever get as much energy (fuel) out of it as the fuel (potential energy) you put into it.
I really take issue with such headlines because people who aren't scientifically literate will be mislead and become stupider as a result.
They're not producing fuel to continue the same reactions, which would be a violation of conservation of energy. They're producing fuel to run a different reaction. Less "perpetual motion machine," more "spinning a turbine to charge a battery to run an EV."
Edit: A better analogy is cracking water to capture the hydrogen, to later burn it in a fuel cell.
Nonetheless, being able to produce tritium, which is the claim that appears in the headline and the article, is very useful, in part because many reactors use it as a fuel source.
There is only one place where I see "more fuel" show up, which is this single sentence:
I agree that this single sentence could have been better worded.