How to make tritium from nuclear waste
A physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory just shared a creative way to make tritium—a rare fuel needed for nuclear fusion—by using nuclear waste from fission reactors.
The idea, presented at a recent American Chemical Society meeting, involves encasing the waste in molten lithium salt and bombarding it with high-energy particles from a superconducting linear accelerator.
This process could safely create enough tritium each year, from a one-gigawatt reactor, to power around 800,000 homes.
Why is tritium so scarce?
Tritium is key for nuclear fusion—the same reaction that powers the sun and could someday give us nearly limitless clean energy.
But here's the catch: there's only about 25kg of tritium available worldwide right now, which really holds back progress on fusion reactors.
If this new method works out, it could finally unlock a steady supply and bring us closer to practical fusion power.