Don’t get me wrong, I like nuclear fusion as much as the next man. Some of my best friends are nuclear fusion fan boys. There are even “I Love Nuke Fusion” T-shirts … However, I did not know that this great energy hope for the future faces a major problem, apart from getting the thing to work, of lacking enough of the element tritium. This a rare and radioactive isotope of hydrogen. The nucleus of tritium (t, sometimes called a triton) contains one proton and two neutrons, whereas the nucleus of the common isotope hydrogen-1 (protium) contains just one proton, and that of hydrogen-2 (deuterium) contains one proton and one neutron. The radioactive material is decaying fast, and there is only 12.3 years before half of the present quantity remains. It decays into helium-3, so maybe that could be used instead, although much of that is in outer space. Nuclear life was not meant to be easy.