[zaroth]

This seems like a great explanation, but it’s missing one key data point — how much tritium is actually present in the plasma at any one moment?

From Iter.org;

> Only a few grams of fuel are present in the plasma at any given moment. This makes a fusion reactor incredibly economical in its fuel consumption and also confers important safety benefits to the installation.

Consider me not particularly worried.

https://www.iter.org/sci/FusionFuels

[bronson]

How many thousands of grams of tritium are transported and stored onsite to supply the reactor? You should be a little worried.

[zaroth]

Tritium can be stored as a solid metal tritide. You can use several different metals but titanium seems to offer the best cost/benefit.

A 7" diameter cylinder 16" high weighing 35 pounds can store 300 grams of tritium safely for 5 years (without releasing any decay helium). It's totally stable at room temperature, stable in water, and needs to be heated to ~600C to add/remove tritium. The decay heat output of 300g of tritium is ~100 watts, so the vessel should probably have some heatsinks and be ventilated.

About 300g of tritium will be required per day to produce 800 MW of power.

https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/...