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New 700MW nuclear plant in Gujarat, India, begins running at full capacity
(www.power-technology.com)
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this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
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It's interesting that India is building lots of heavy water reactors, because they produce tritium, which would be useful for bootstrapping fusion: https://www.science.org/content/article/fusion-power-may-run-fuel-even-gets-started
Makes having a robust nuclear weapons program cheaper too. It's the primary maintenance cost in maintaining modern nuclear weapons. Due to the short half life of tritium and it turning into neutron absorbing He3 you need to refresh it every 10 years or so for each bomb.
No no, definitely fusion. Not nuclear bombs.
Oh and the plutonium produced will be stored in our super safe facility over here. Please don't look into it.
A sufficiently-large pile of cash could redirect that tritium from weapons to fusion development when the time comes. Seems better than not having enough supply anywhere.
Truth is if the economics are there, tritium is not a problem. You just put lithium-6 in a reactor with an irradiation channel and breed it that way (its what the soviets did in many reactors including Chernobyl). All lithium-6 is currently used to make fusion bombs, though.