US Joins ITER Tokamak Fusion Project

WannabePhysicist writes "Energy secretary Spencer Abraham announced at the Princeton Plasma Fusion Laboratory that the U.S. will join ITER , the international plasma fusion reactor effort. They're currently planning a tokamak (doughnut) design, and have some pretty optimistic energy production predictions for 2014. As many of us in science know, estimated times are usually off by a factor of two, and then sometimes and order of magnitude -- but hopefully they'll get it to work. Many people push this as the cleanest form of energy, but fusion reactors will most likely contain deuterium, tritium, and lithium (tritium's not exactly water) The deuterium and tritium fuse, giving off an alpha (4He nucleus), a neutron, and some energy. This energy causes more reactions (the controlled fusion part). The neutrons hit a 6Li blanket (surrounding the chamber) which then produces more tritium for burning."

Tritium's not water

[Finuvir]

tritium's not exactly water

Actually Tritium's not water at all, it's heavy hydrogen. That is, one proton, two neutrons.

Re:Tritium

[helix400]

Tritium is an isotope of hydrogen.

It has absolutely nothing to do with water. (H20).

I think what the poster to this article, WannabePhysicist, was thinking about heavy water, which is 2 deuteriums + 1 Oxygen. I've never heard about a 2 Tritium + 1 Oxygen though? Has anyone else heard about it? Do they call it super heavy water? Or do they just not give it a name?