[lucozade]

Most experimental approaches to fusion use a deuterium-tritium reaction. It's not the only possibility but it's not a wild bet that tritium will be needed whichever fusion tech wins.

And as tritium has a relatively short half life, it makes sense to research ways to generate, recycle and store it.

There's no reason to wait for a self-sustaining reactor to be online before you start to research other technologies that would be needed for a commercially viable setup. There's no obvious reason why this shouldn't be done in parallel.

The value of the basic research aside, it strikes me that it's as least as valuable as any current fusion research.