While I appreciate all the effort in nuclear fusion and do think we should continue to invest a little of each years global R&D budget, it seems these reactors (e.g ITER and this one) still require tritium which is rather hard to come by efficiently.
Which means normal nuclear reactors will be needed to make it and minimising any economic viability of the dependent fusion rector for a long long time.
> tritium which is rather hard to come by efficiently
I'm not by any means well informed on the matter, but isn't the lunar surface covered in tritium deposits?
It might make sense to mine the moon sooner than later. Once we have the necessary equipment and resources there, the delta-v for getting the mined product to Earth isn't nearly as substantial.
Building lunar mining tech is likely to unlock all sorts of advances for the human race.
Normal nuclear reactors are a good thing too, and they alone are enough to solve all of humanity’s energy problems (though we should pursue fusion power too, of course). See Integral Fast Reactor.
Breeder reactors are not "notoriously dangerous", they are just a little too expensive to justify their construction when the uranium is cheap (like it is now). Also, there are proliferation risks. However, these are not engineering problems nor scientific problems, breeder reactors are production-ready and safe.
I've never really gotten the "proliferation risk" in the context of US power production (or China, Russia, or even France, for that matter). We're talking about existing nuclear powers, they already have the capacity to make nuclear weapons. If they wanted more they would make more, for the simple reason that having nuclear weapons is table stakes for being a serious player in geopolitics.
Tritium will be bred in the reactor that uses it. Exactly how is a problem which will be solved further down the development path but there’s little question about the viability of that.
I believe the tritium issue is addressed through the inclusion of lithium in the reactor's inner blanket [1]. Something about the neutron interaction with the lithium results in some non-trivial production of tritium which is then freed into the reactor. tl;dr - they've thought of that.
Isn't this the case with nearly every aspect of "proposed" fusion reactors. Just because it's proposed or "not yet tested on a commercial fusion reactor" does not necessarily mean that the mechanism is not well understood.
I think if it were so well understood, ITER wouldn't be testing over 100 different breeder blanket designs. I've seen breeder blanket design described as one of the biggest challenges with fusion today.
I would expect that it is more a matter of selecting the best/optimized design rather than demonstrating the fundamental viability of tritium breeding.
Which means normal nuclear reactors will be needed to make it and minimising any economic viability of the dependent fusion rector for a long long time.