this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2025
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UK firm achieves first commercial tritium breakthrough for fusion fuel (interestingengineering.com)
submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (7 children)

The ability to generate tritium within the reactor is crucial. A sustainable fusion energy system needs to produce more fuel than it consumes

I clearly don't understand the fusion process. Deuterium is used to fuse and create tritium?

The reactor core also features an electron-screened environment. This design reduces the energy needed to overcome the Coulomb barrier between particles, which lowers required fusion temperatures by several million degrees and allows for higher performance in a compact size.

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (5 children)

Produce more fuel than it consumed... I'm pretty sure that's breaking a law somewhere... And not the human kind...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Any element below iron is technically fuel for fusion.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 23 hours ago

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:

The ability to generate tritium within the reactor is crucial. A sustainable fusion energy system needs to produce more fuel than it consumes. This development shows a path toward solving that engineering challenge.

I agree that this single sentence could have been better worded.

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