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UK Scientists Achieve First Commercial Tritium Production (interestingengineering.com) 51

Posted by EditorDavid from the breeding-success dept.
Interesting Engineering reports: Astral Systems, a UK-based private commercial fusion company, has claimed to have become the first firm to successfully breed tritium, a vital fusion fuel, using its own operational fusion reactor. This achievement, made with the University of Bristol, addresses a significant hurdle in the development of fusion energy....

Scientists from Astral Systems and the University of Bristol produced and detected tritium in real-time from an experimental lithium breeder blanket within Astral's multi-state fusion reactors. "There's a global race to find new ways to develop more tritium than what exists in today's world — a huge barrier is bringing fusion energy to reality," said Talmon Firestone, CEO and co-founder of Astral Systems. "This collaboration with the University of Bristol marks a leap forward in the search for viable, greater-than-replacement tritium breeding technologies. Using our multi-state fusion technology, we are the first private fusion company to use our reactors as a neutron source to produce fusion fuel."

Astral Systems' approach uses its Multi-State Fusion (MSF) technology. The company states this will commercialize fusion power with better performance, efficiency, and lower costs than traditional reactors. Their reactor design, the result of 25 years of engineering and over 15 years of runtime, incorporates recent understandings of stellar physics. A core innovation is lattice confinement fusion (LCF), a concept first discovered by NASA in 2020. This allows Astral's reactor to achieve solid-state fuel densities 400 million times higher than those in plasma. The company's reactors are designed to induce two distinct fusion reactions simultaneously from a single power input, with fusion occurring in both plasma and a solid-state lattice.
The article includes this quote from professor Tom Scott, who led the University of Bristol's team, supported by the Royal Academy of Engineering and UK Atomic Energy Authority. "This landmark moment clearly demonstrates a potential path to scalable tritium production in the future and the capability of Multi-State Fusion to produce isotopes in general."

And there's also this prediction from the company's web site: "As we progress the fusion rate of our technology, aiming to exceed 10 trillion DT fusions per second per system, we unlock a wide range of applications and capabilities, such as large-scale medical isotope production, fusion neutron materials damage testing, transmutation of existing nuclear waste stores, space applications, hybrid fusion-fission power systems, and beyond."
"Scientists everywhere are racing to develop this practically limitless form of energy," write a climate news site called The Cooldown. (Since in theory nuclear fusion "has an energy output four times higher than that of fission, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.")

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot for sharing the news.

UK Scientists Achieve First Commercial Tritium Production More | Reply

UK Scientists Achieve First Commercial Tritium Production

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  • So just to avoid misunderstandings... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ffkom ( 3519199 ) on Saturday July 05, 2025 @07:03PM (#65500044)
    ... the "15 years of runtime" of their "operational fusion reactor" never produced any net energy gain - they were just after the isotope production, right?

    Which means there is still only that tiny little detail missing before fusion reactors will replace all the other sources of energy... that detail being "becoming net energy positive, at costs where with the surplus energy can be sold cheaper than from established sources of energy".
    • If only there was some other fusion source we could use for Energy? We could be so well off. Let me think about that while drinking dihydrogen oxide.

    • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Not quite. There is and had been a lot of plasma physics and material science research going on, all targetted at making commercially viable fusion a reality. It has been slow going since so much of this stuff is new and requires real research not just engineering. That "detail" is an end-goal to be attained when it realistically can be. Which is not yet, but it is getting closer.

      That said, this is another hurdle taken and things moved a step. It also means the understanding of things has moved a significan

      • Re:So just to avoid misunderstandings... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Mspangler ( 770054 ) on Saturday July 05, 2025 @09:10PM (#65500192)

        A breakthrough is possible, but I'm sixty-something. Fusion has been "just around the corner" my whole life. So yes I'm skeptical this bunch of no-name yahoos has been belting out even a pilot-plant scale 20 MW onto the grid for any significant time.

        The first controlled fission reactor was in 1942. The Nautilus went to sea in 1955. That's what actual progress looks like.

        • A breakthrough has already happened - ReBCO superconductors. They enable much more powerful magnets, at higher temperatures and lower power levels. This is important for two reasons. 1. It means that a reactor uses much less power to keep itself running, cooling, and operating the magnets that hold the fusion in place. 2. It means the power density of the reactor goes up with the cube of the magnetic field strength. It makes it much much much easier to reach the densities needed to get to break even.

    • >bitching about a working fusion reactor specifically designed to make specific isotopes instead of power for your permanently attached phone that you are addicted to

      What's next, gonna complain that your bulldozer isn't winning the indy500?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by quenda ( 644621 )

      never produced any net energy gain - they were just after the isotope production, right?

      No shit, Sherlock!
      Who said anything about energy production? It is kind of obvious, given that fusion power plants don't exist.

      • I have thought that long before electromagnetic-confinement fusion reaches power production, it will be useful and usable for isotope production. Tritium for "boosted" fission weapons and possibly breeding plutonium?

    • This doesn't seem to be about net-zero power production, but about other applications such as isotope production. This is used e.g. in medical and other fields.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ffkom ( 3519199 )
      I guess if they succeed in producing more Tritium while at the same time the demand for Tritium for the "fusion" purpose goes down for some reason (like investors no longer betting on "fusion" to become a competitive energy source, or fusion of other isotopes becoming more interesting to use), then the currently small market for Tritium might see some price decline.

      I for one am fine with the electroluminescent illumination of my watch, and do not really miss Tritium for that purpose.
      • What kind of watch do you have that the lume is good? I have IWC pilot, Omega speedmaster and Rolex date just and I gotta say modern lume like supralume is vastly inferior to tritium (or old school radium!). It lasts a few hours at best if you're out in the sun all day and isn't that bright.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ffkom ( 3519199 )
          I like Indiglo [wikipedia.org] illumination - which depends on battery power, not sunlight.
          • Ah yes that Indiglo etc will definitely work better than lume for powered or quartz watches. Us in the old fashioned automatic or manual wind camp have Super-LumiNova, which is inferior to Tritium in all ways except that it isn't well, radioactive and thus isn't banned. I am mystified that a quartz watch with better lume depreciates (one I inherited from my father from the 80s is worth a whopping $40), but my watches have doubled or tripled in value over the decade I've been wearing them. I think peop

    • I was thinking more about glowing sights on handguns, but the technology is the same for both.

      Was tritium production really a concern in the first place? From what I've seen there's plenty of tritium produced in heavy water fission reactors like Candu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      The issue is not that it is difficult to produce but rather difficult to separate out from other hydrogen isotopes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      Maybe I'm missing something important here as I'm not seeing how this is som

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      Night sights.

    • Where is a quantum theory of gravity. That's what matters.
      • I recently read about a 3D theory about time, and I guess Gravity is not really real. Somehow time is 3D and gravity is a byproduct of that. It does seems as good of a theory of most. With respect to Einstein, he seems to be on target.
        • Occam's razor though, keeps pointing me to the solution that we are living in a simulation. There is no solution to nonsense. I think that eventually someone will find a computer algorithm that gives us all of the answers to how atoms work, how gravity works, and explains time. It is a simulation.
          • If time is a simulation, what is its underlying stratum?
            • There is a limitation, I think, to the speed of the computer that is controlling this simulation. Outside of this simulation, there may be no correlation between how fast mass moves and time.
              • It's interesting to theorize, but I certainly have doubts. A dream seems just as likely as a simulation. But what is doing the dreaming? Or if it's a computer, where is it running? Or is that computer also in a simulation? How deep do the turtles go? It seems like the answer would be none, one, or infinity.
                • I suggest that you theorize and dream. It is a gift we have, even if we are just a simulation or children of Gods. Let us theorize and dream.

                  • Re: Will this make glowing watched cheaper? (Score:4, Interesting)

                    by commodore73 ( 967172 ) on Saturday July 05, 2025 @10:31PM (#65500242)
                    I absolutely concur. I gave up on believing in reality some time ago. I prefer to explore the dream. I accept that it is impossible to understand everything or to know basically anything. I don't care whether people who seem crazy to me consider me to be crazy. About religion specifically, it really doesn't matter what I believe; what I do matters. People fighting over such unprovable beliefs seems more crazy than anything I've ever done.
                    • dang, post of the day and respect.
                    • I still wonder why e=mc squared? It implies that time changes with the speed of light. I don't want to make anybody else here crazier than I am, but, wow, that does not seem like common sense to me. I usually post on another site, but they kicked me off because off.. MAGAs "free speech". I am posting here. So please have patients with me. If I need a "defense", I have been a member of Slashdot for over 20 yeas, I simply respected the site so much that I would not spill my insanity on it. I did i
                    • Well I'll gone further to see if I can ruin my streak of one. I was watching something yesterday about the relationship between Hinduism and Buddhism and perspectives on whether the self or soul exists. If you look at everything as karma, summarized as cause and effect, our circumstances are an effect of past karma, and what we do creates future karma in basically an infinite complex web. So I am only the sum of my past thoughts and I leave only the effects of my actions, whether or not the self or soul exi
                    • My random thoughts is about what you said, is that I think Karma is a bitch, and no good deed goes unpunished. I have learned this from this video game. I am not sure what the point is, but it is what it is.
                    • and yes, I am human. I read my responses and think that I am a chatbot. I simply grew up in America, and yes, I bleed. I bled today, had a cut on my leg. I feel sorry for the future, when nobody can tell the difference, and everybody is isolated by AI's.
                    • > I still wonder why e=mc squared?

                      I don’t have the answer, but I also believe that this is the only conditions under which the universe can exist, and that varying values and equations would only result in universes that cannot exist, and so I do not believe in multiple universes or the multiverse. One question is whether these values, or our observations of them, vary at different times and locations, and how this is related to time, gravity, and any other factors. This is way beyond my educati
                    • I give up on not just ramlbing, so this might not make sense and I’m not going to edit, especially for political correctness.

                      > Karma is a bitch

                      It is also a reality.

                      Random thought on Karma. I spend most of my time between Thailand and Lao, the cultures of which are primarily variants of Buddhism mixed with local traditions such as animism. Buddhism in a sense derives from Hinduism (which I believe defined Karma) but disagrees with certain elements of its fundamentals, such as the caste syst
                    • Posting without editing again > I am human.

                      My point was that we’re all basically something like LLMs, just muddling up confused thoughts and perspectives that we’ve absorbed from elsewhere. If you think about all the flaws in the human mind, it’s pretty amazing that we can function at all and that we got this far. Personally, I think human society peaked last century, before the Internet and especially before social media.

                      > I simply grew up in America

                      I did too, but I was lu

          • If it's nonsense then there's no predictable algorithm to prove it's a simulation.

            Occam's razor should tell you we're not in a simulation because it cannot be turtles all the way down. At some point the computer has to run on something, so that someone must exist. The voice is therefore something, or something plus a whole stack of nested simulations. The latter is always more complex than the former, so if you use Occam's razor then the former is more likely.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by gtall ( 79522 )

            Not this simulation crap again. Jesus, learn some physics and math. The "simulation" idea is merely a mathematical relationship between a conformal field theory on a boundary and a gravitational theory on the bulk. That's it. It is nothing more than a mathematical isomorphism.

            For a simple example, take the non-negative even natural numbers, There is an isomorphism between those and the non-negative odd natural numbers. That does not mean they are the same goddamn numbers. An isomorphism only is relative to

            • You kind of lost me at the "non negative natural numbers part", I am searching for the negative natural numbers now.
              Hm ...
              I am still searching ...

      • An theory that provides us a means to build anti-gravity devices would be better.

  • Not much tritium (Score:3)

    by joe_frisch ( 1366229 ) on Saturday July 05, 2025 @09:05PM (#65500188)

    1e13 Tritiums / second * 3 * 1.6e-27 (atomic mass kg) * 3e7 seconds / year = 1.4e-6 kg/year. Tritium is about $30,000 / gm so this is about $4/year in tritium value.

    They are aiming to get there. Doesn't sound economically viable.

    • I don't understand their market. CANDU reactors will produce enough tritium until 2050 https://www.science.org/conten... [science.org] After that, we indeed need more reactors, but that's a long time for them to survive without anybody needing their product, as there is enough right now and it's basically "free" (as a byproduct of fission reactors).

  • To paraphrase Mitch Hedberg (Score:3)

    by algaeman ( 600564 ) on Saturday July 05, 2025 @09:56PM (#65500222)
    Their reactor design incorporates recent understandings of stellar physics- it's the same understanding we used to have of stellar physics, but we still understand it.

  • Now, everyone can have their own hydrogen bomb!

  • > Astral Systems' approach uses its Multi-State Fusion (MSF) technology. The company states this
    > will commercialize fusion power with better performance, efficiency, and lower costs than traditional
    > reactors. Their reactor design, the result of 25 years of engineering and over 15 years of runtime,
    > incorporates recent understandings of stellar physics. A core innovation is lattice confinement fusion
    > (LCF), a concept first discovered by NASA in 2020

    So much to unpack here.

    1) they claim the c

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