Their never going to have a full years tritium on hand so that’s kind of an odd benchmark. Getting the cost of Tritium down to $10,000 per gram is somewhat optimistic, significant effort is going to be used to recover it.
As to the Mississippi River flow estimate that’s something like 6 orders of magnitude larger than what I am referring to. Still, the other way of looking at that statistic is if half of the Tritium used per day was dumped into the Missisippi every day it would be considered safe to drink when well mixed.
That figure was to point out the large volume flowing through the system. Containment will have to be very good. Only a tiny percentage of that tritium can be allowed to escape.
Realize also that what has to be constrained is the cumulative leakage from all fusion power plants, not just a single one. The world would need on the order of 10,000 1GW power plants, to displace fossil fuels.
That’s moving the goalposts, the US only has 95.5 gigawatts of nuclear power and it’s moving away from nuclear. At that level even just 99.9% containment you can replace all US fission reactors and have 1/10th the annual releases your concerned about spread across a much larger area.
Globally, I do think fission or potentially fusion has a minor role because it could be important for a few countries locally even if it’s not cost effective in most areas. But realistically their only really competing with each other.
It's not moving the goalposts, it's describing the scale of the problem. If fusion won't be addressing a significant fraction of the CO2 problem, it will be because it's inferior to the non-fossil energy sources that are. In which case, why is it even needed?
Nuclear fission looks unable to compete with renewables at current prices in almost all the world. There's a zone around Poland where it does the best. But even those zones go away as renewables and storage proceed down their experience curves. If there are very minor niche uses, fission would work just fine vs. fusion, particularly in high latitude countries that are already members of the nuclear club.
Circling back to my original post, it’s clearly not needed any time soon. I think it’s worth doing in much the same way building the ISS was worth doing. That said, I was trying to avoid being dismissive of possible upsides which seem unlikely but still possible.
As to the Mississippi River flow estimate that’s something like 6 orders of magnitude larger than what I am referring to. Still, the other way of looking at that statistic is if half of the Tritium used per day was dumped into the Missisippi every day it would be considered safe to drink when well mixed.