[ncmncm]

Not getting this. I understand you have to get it out fast because you need it for fuel tomorrow. Is it that you don't want your bred tritium floating in a sea of regular hydrogen, needing separation by physical rather than chemical means?

That seems like the least of our problems.

[pfdietz]

It's a totally avoidable problem, though. Also, you really want to recycle tritium back into the reactor really quickly (like, within hours, if possible) or else closing the tritium breeding loop becomes more difficult.

https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/research.seas.ucla.edu/dist/d/... (see slide 21)

[ncmncm]

Wow, that slide deck makes fusion look even worse that I had thought.

"40 years away and increasing" is an eye-opening admission. They have no plan for how to produce more tritium than they consume, never mind any way to collect it. And they don't expect to have access to enough tritium to even start operations on the successor to ITER.

Another startling omission is that Tokamak and stellarator designs are unsuitable for a production reactor, and there are no alternatives under consideration.

Finally, they have not identified a structural material that will stand up to the neutron bombardment and continue to hold the reactor together.

It makes the fusion startup companies look even more like out-and-out scams.