Lithium (as breeding feedstock)

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1. Story
2. Lithium is the feedstock from which tritium would be bred. Fusion neutrons striking lithium-6 produce tritium and helium; the lithium-7 reaction also contributes but consumes rather than produces a neutron on balance in the relevant channel, which is why enrichment in lithium-6 features in most blanket designs. Candidate blanket forms include lithium ceramic pebble beds and liquid lead-lithium eutectic, two of which — the Helium-Cooled Pebble-Bed and the Helium-Cooled Lead Lithium concepts — are among the six systems ITER is designed to test. Lithium is not the scarce link in the chain in the way tritium is, but lithium-6 enrichment capacity is a separate industrial question from lithium supply, and it sits inside the same battery-driven market. It is listed here because the tritium constraint is only relieved by a working lithium blanket, not by finding more tritium.
3. Knowledge
4. Lithium (as breeding feedstock)
5. Salar de Atacama
6. Connections
7. Tritium breeding blanket
8. Salar de Atacama
9. Lithium-ion battery storage
10. The lithium price collapses after its 2022 peak
11. Lithium (as breeding feedstock)
12. Evidence
13. ITER is designed to test breeding blanket mock-ups rather than to operate a closed breeding cycle, and no fusion device has yet demonstrated tritium self-sufficiency
14. The world civil tritium stockpile, sourced almost entirely from CANDU heavy-water reactors, is of order tens of kilograms, is projected to peak and then decline as those reactors retire, and decays continuously at a 12.3-year half-life