> tritium is ridiculously expensive, at $30k per gram
D-T fusion almost always breeds tritium in the blanket.
D-T fusion almost always breeds tritium in the blanket.
How would it affect the rough calculations above?
Tritium decays in a decade. To start, you'd need the expensive stuff harvested from the heavy water of spent fuel pools. After that, you'd let your neutrons breed it in lithium (or boron, if you're fancy).
There also is no enormous market for tritium. So in short, fusion reactors exist on both sides of the tritium market, by becoming the primary producers and consumers of it, which should lead to significant drop in price of tritium.
How much do these things ring true in this case and what are ideas of improvement?
Parent post suggests that tritium is a fixed cost, more like a construction cost than a fuel cost. We can’t answer this question without a lot more information. We’d need to know how much tritium is needed to reach the point the reactor breeds more than it consumes, if at all.