Jones Beene wrote:
Tritium is hundreds of thousands of times more costly
to manufacture than is deuterium.
One solution. If you buy used reactor heavy water with a lot of
tritium in it, this is the perfect raw material source for two
reasons: you can recover the tritium, which is relatively easy to do
because of the large mass differential with deuterium (i.e. it is 50% denser).
Well, I wouldn't know about how easy it is, but the U.S., Russian and
Chinese military all have their own tritium production facilities.
They do not need to extract the stuff from Candu reactor water. Price
is not an issue with these people. The U.S. weapons tritium reactor
is here in Georgia. They have not used it in decades because they
have a huge glut of tritium from all of the nuclear bombs they have
decommissioned in treaties with the Russians, but they are thinking
of turning it on again.
And - as a fringe benefit you get clean deuterium oxide to sell back
for more than you paid.
They cannot possibly sell it, except as moderator water, as I said.
It is completely unfit for any other purpose. No technology could
begin to remove enough of the contamination. God only knows what they
will do with stuff when it is finally finished.
As far as I know the Chinese do not have any heavy water moderated
reactors, unless they have purchased Candu reactors. The only heavy
water reactors I know of are Candu, the Indian 100 MW Dhurva at BARC,
and the Iranian IR-40 40 MW experimental unit at Esfahan (which is
apparently made in India). You should look up the Dhurva; it uses
natural uranium, with heavy water as moderator and coolant.
Experience with this reactor is what gave them the expertise in
tritium that they brought to cold fusion, and it is also the reason
they are now doing cutting-edge research in heavy water production. A
few years ago the Indians were the only serious rivals to the
Canadians in industrial scale production of heavy water.
Ah ha. This source says the Chinese have a 15 MW heavy-water
moderated natural uranium reactor:
http://www.iranwatch.org/privateviews/First%20Watch/perspex-fwi-ir40reactor-1203.htm
It makes lotsa Pu. Lovely.
- Jed
