Obviously you'd just remove it from the market or drop the price to nearly nothing.Icy belt clusters are rare - you need a dim star (class K or M), a distant asteroid belt, and a bit of luck - but they certainly exist. I know of three just in the populated systems near me.
The big problem with scooping as a mechanism for obtaining Tritium is it's (currently) entirely automated:
- get cool-running ship that can sit in supercruise indefinitely
- park in corona at minimum speed
- make sure you're not actually pointed at the star
- check in every hour to adjust heading or just pick a really big star and come back in the morning.
For something which can be sold for about 45k/tonne being able to get 36 million worth of cargo / several jumps for your carrier automatically overnight into your T-9 would be a bit silly.
(8A fuel scoop is 1.68 tonnes/second for hydrogen, which would be 272 million credits/hour at a 1:1 ratio, or still better than most actual ways of earning credits at 5:1, or still enough to fill up your tank while you slept at 60:1 ... but a tonne a minute would be painfully slow for anything but leaving your ship there overnight)
If they made an entirely new star-scooping mechanism where you had to interactively fly through Tritium-rich hotspots in giant/supergiant/B-class stars (easy to avoid if you don't want Tritium) which cause immense heat buildup so you've got to be diving in and out (or using heatsinks, or just tanking the heat damage and repairing at your carrier later) and actually interacting with the game, then great, absolutely ... wouldn't even have to replace mining for it, necessarily.
(And sure, the half-life makes no sense, but on the other hand having your Polonium and Technetium raw materials decay rapidly wouldn't be much fun either)
But I'm down with the mechanics too.