Tritium has a 4500-day half-life, so exists on Earth only as the result of substantial technological intervention; since you need it to make H-bombs go off, the substantial technological intervention occurred. You make it by irradiating lithium rods in conventional fission reactors (the rods replace conventional control rods); proposed fusion reactors have a lithium blanket which both makes more tritium and provides some neutron shielding.
Production rates at present aren't great - 1.2 grams per rod in an eighteen-month cycle, 240 rods in the reactor at any one time, so about half a pound per year.
Tangential point; CANDU produced enough tritium as a by-product of its PHR operations to support light industrial use back when I was a student. (IIRC, they had a nice sideline in self-illuminating EXIT signs.)
-- Steve's google-fu is weak today, else he'd provide reference links above.
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james_davis_nicoll) wrote2013-08-29 12:04 am
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Production rates at present aren't great - 1.2 grams per rod in an eighteen-month cycle, 240 rods in the reactor at any one time, so about half a pound per year.
no subject
-- Steve's google-fu is weak today, else he'd provide reference links above.