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by jtcohen
480 days ago
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Safely handling tritium is fantastically more complicated that the fuel of a fission power plant - I disagree with this, especially when considering the infinitely long HLW with fission fuel. Handling Tritium isn't easy but it's much more manageable. Tritium breeding: we will have a FLiBe blanket and breed tritium, but we won't be processing and pulling out the Tritium on board, that will happen on land, so at port you drain the Tritiated FLiBe and replace it with Li-6 enriched FLiBe. There's a few companies working on the Tritium fuel cycle technology that are making great progress. |
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You don't have to process high level wastes on your ship, but you do with tritium. Even if you don't plant to extract the tritium from the blanket modules, you do need to recycle the unburnt fuel (the burn-up fraction is at best a few percent).
Tritium is radioactive hydrogen: it's a gas that explodes in air at low concetrations, it reacts with organic compunds, it has high mobility in pretty much any material, by decaying it produces Helium bubbles that can embrittle metals, its β radiation crack glasses etc.