'This technology is possible today': Nuclear waste could be future power source and increase access to a rare fuel [View all]

By Perri Thaler
published August 21, 2025

One physicist says his design to use nuclear waste as fuel for nuclear fusion could help the U.S. be a leader in the fusion economy.



Nuclear waste could be repurposed into a rare isotope necessary for nuclear fusion, which could theoretically produce near-limitless amounts of clean energy, one scientist says.

The radioactive version of hydrogen, called tritium, is not naturally readily available on Earth, is expensive to produce, and can be made in limited quantities. At the fall meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) this week, Terence Tarnowsky, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, suggested that tritium could be harvested from a byproduct of nuclear fission, which powers existing nuclear reactors.

Nuclear fusion is the process of combining atoms to release heat. While several fusion reactions could theoretically produce power, one of the more common ones would fuse tritium with deuterium, another isotope of hydrogen, to produce helium.

But, as of now, nuclear fusion is not possible on a commercial scale because scientists have not yet figured out how to achieve large-scale ignition — the point where a self-sustaining reaction produces more energy than is put in.

Another big barrier, though, is the cost of fuels like tritium.

More:
https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/nuclear-energy/this-technology-is-possible-today-nuclear-waste-could-be-future-power-source-and-increase-access-to-a-rare-fuel