- "If not for CANDU reactors, D-T fusion would be an unattainable dream. “The luckiest thing to happen for fusion in the world is that CANDU reactors produce tritium as a byproduct,” Abdou says. Many nuclear reactors use ordinary water to cool the core and “moderate” the chain reaction, slowing neutrons so they are more likely to trigger fission. CANDU reactors use heavy water, in which deuterium takes the place of hydrogen, because it absorbs fewer neutrons, leaving more for fission. But occasionally, a deuterium nucleus does capture a neutron and is transformed into tritium."
- "If too much tritium builds up in the heavy water it can be a radiation hazard, so every so often operators send their heavy water to the utility company Ontario Power Generation (OPG) to be “detritiated.” OPG filters out the tritium and sells off about 100 grams of it a year, mostly as a medical radioisotope and for glow-in-the-dark watch dials and emergency signage. “It’s a really nice waste-to-product story,” says Ian Castillo of Canadian Nuclear Laboratories, which acts as OPG’s distributor."
"Whats your annual yield?"
"100 grams...."
I wonder if there are other elements being produced and sold that have such low yearly yields. Bonus points if they are super expensive.
How much botox is produced per year: 800 million units [1] = 0.04 grams
Average cost per injection is $466 [3]
Allergan’s $2.8 billion Botox empire (2017), on track to grow to $4 billion by 2020 [4]
[1] https://www.brightnewme.co.uk/want-to-know-what-its-like-ins...
[2] a unit is 5.0 x 10 power -11 grams: https://toxedfoundation.org/botulinum-toxin-and-botox/
[3] https://www.plasticsurgery.org/cosmetic-procedures/botulinum...
[4] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-10-26/inside-fo...
In some cases the half lives of the isotopes are so short they literally have to be produced on demand at a facility nearby, which usually means they can only be produced/used by facilities with their own equipment for producing them, or they are colocated on some sort of larger campus where they happen to have a suitable isotope producing accelerator as their neighbour.
Fluorine-18 is used in certain kinds of PET scans for cancer imaging, and has a half life of 109 minutes! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorine-18
Technetium-99m is one of the most commonly used radioisotopes for medical imaging and has a half life of just over 6 hours https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technetium-99m so the usual mechanism is to ship the material that decays into Technetium-99m because the Molybdenum-99 parent isotope has a half life of 66 hours so lives long enough you can actually ship usable amounts around. So while this one is obviously not a low yield isotope, it really shows how the half life of the isotope can be worked around to make an an isotope a useful product.
Its a little hard to give simple numbers for a lot of these since they get measured by "activity" in Becquerels (Bq) as that's the useful metric based on how they get used, so giving "mass" would involve a lot of math and some guesses based on how efficient supply chains are (since you might produce twice as much and just "eat the difference" letting it decay if you have no other good way to get it to the user faster) but its a very fascinating industry.
Theres some fascinating information about how this sort of stuff gets made https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/te_1340_web.p... if you want to find out just how "fiddly" it can be to do chemistry with elements that might just decide to change what they are while you're working with them.
Most of the synthetic elements (like technetium, it's in the name) probably have similar or far lower yields to tritium since they all are produced by transmutation and that requires monstrous amounts of energy.
Not an element, botulinum toxin has billions of doses made, but the total production is well under a gram.
That's one gargantuan "once", let's plan our energy generation assuming it doesn't materialize, we can always recalibrate if it does.
That being said, fusion will come too late to do something about climate change, so we should be building renewables as quickly as we can, and, if we have too much money, perhaps add a bit of nuclear.
Fossil fuel companies are parasites.
If the answer is steam then fusion is as dead as coal and nuclear. Or is there some solid state like solar or very non-complex working method like a wind turbine which is the target?
That cost difference is the reason coal has died out, it's simply not economical to run a large steam turbine.
Today we also have LNG, but that seems to mostly be about energy independence. Russia can't simply turn off the tap for Lithuania or Poland, because they have a more pricy alternative method of delivery.
For reference see the dramatic decrease of coal in the US in favor of natural gas.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
Let's not take it for granted, for sure, but let's maybe dial back on the "fusion is always 20 years away" jokes. There isn't a bigger win for civilization than fusion, leaving aside unknowns: immortality might be possible, fusion was our only source of energy until the discovery of fission.
I hope you will allow people still being sceptical and cautious about counting on fusion for at least another 20-30 years.
The progress that the physicists and engineers made is tremendous and I appreciate everyone's sacrifices to make fusion a viable energy source.
However, it isn't one yet and likely it won't be for decades. There are still plenty of engineering challenges, and once those are solved, comes the economical, bureaucratical challenges (just take a look at how bad most countries are in building new fission reactors).
Both can be true at the same time.
I don't know about you, but I am planning my life with the assumption that the energy I use won't be coming from fusion for the rest of it (and I am around 30).
I'm on the optimism side of that coin though.
It's by no means necessary for a joke to have been made in the comment I was replying to, for me to refer to it. The cliché is well known.
See Prof. Dennis Whyte, one of the of cofounders of CFS explain why he believes that fusion is coming sooner than you might think.
Total worldwide annual production of tritium is under 10 kg.
It is just barely possible Helion could succeed someday.
see https://www.science.org/content/article/fusion-power-may-run... for more info.