The Absurd Absence of Fuel for Nuclear Fusion
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By Steven B. Krivit
June 11, 2022
Wired, a well-known technology magazine, has reported a fuel crisis in nuclear fusion. It is actually a public relations crisis: the fuel needed for commercial nuclear fusion does not exist.
“It doesn’t even work yet, but nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium, the key fuel source for the most prominent experimental reactors,” Wired wrote.
Nuclear fusion has not encountered a shortage of tritium. That would imply that the fuel once existed. Tritium has never existed in nature as a fuel source.
Absurdly, fusion scientists have planned to rely, in the short term, on a small number of obsolete fission reactors that produce tritium as an unintended by-product. But, as New Energy Times reported on Jan. 8, 2022, the problem doesn’t end there.
In the long term, fusion scientists have hoped to produce tritium from lithium-6. But fusion scientists do not know of an environmentally safe, legal way to produce the necessary quantities of lithium enriched in the lithium-6 isotope. It’s only produced in quantity in North Korea, China and Russia — for use in nuclear weapons.
The fusion community has known about the lack of fusion fuel for half a century. But when communicating with the public, fusion scientists said that the fuel for nuclear fusion is “abundant, virtually inexhaustible, and equally accessible to everyone.”
Some fusion scientists are now acknowledging in the peer-reviewed literature that they do not know how to make the needed quantities of lithium-6 and even if they did, they do not know how to breed it fast enough to make the needed quantities of tritium. New Energy Times began reporting the fusion fuel story on Oct. 10, 2021.
The fuel for nuclear fusion doesn’t exist. It never did.
