Arthur Dent wrote: ↑February 11 22, 4:54 pm
G. Keenan wrote: ↑February 11 22, 3:33 pm
What could go wrong with a floating ball of plasma 10 times hotter than the sun?
I'm amazed we can even engineer metals to withstand that. For now these reactions are small and brief. How would you engineer something that can handle those temperatures for bigger, longer fusion reactions?
That’s just the problem: you can’t. Nowhere close. The idea is to create a torus filled with this plasma that is contained not by barriers of physical material but with extremely intense magnetic fields that are supposed to keep all the particles flowing in a kind of spiral path around the loop never contacting the walls which are separated from the hot plasma by a region of vacuum (i.e. empty space).
But this is really hard to do much less sustain, and the plasma will often get unstable, escape the magnetic confinement and plow into the actual physical walls. The temperature is unimaginably high, but the plasma density is ultra low,
so I don’t know that massive explosion is the issue as much as severe damage (melting a hole, etc) to all the incredibly expensive equipment arranged around the torus.
@Superorganism @Joe Shlabotnik
Exactly. I'm pretty far out of my element here, but as you note, it's incredibly difficult to fuse atoms and requires large amounts of energy to create the perfect scenario in which it can happen. If something goes wrong, like the plasma playing bumper cars with the walls, the reaction just stops. And, the molecules they're dealing with in fusion are deuterium (hydrogen with an extra neutron, occurs naturally in abundance, is not radioactive), tritium (hydrogen with two extra neutrons, is not abundant but can be made somewhat easily, releases radioactive beta rays), and helium that results from the previous two molecules fusing which I don't believe is radioactive.
So getting a runaway reaction similar to what happened at Chernobyl is chemically impossible. And, not impossible like well in the worst case scenario we hit the red button that stops everything, but impossible in the sense that the basic setup isn't dealing with molecules that would ever react in the first place.
Still, yeah, 100M degree plasma can probably do some damage. And, the release of tritium into your drinking reservoir in large doses would not be ideal. Of course, the same can be said for spent nuclear fuel created in the fission reactors. And, really, the same can be said for any number of byproducts released during the burning of petro or coal that gets released into the air everyday at plants all around the world, a lot of which don't even have to get into water to hurt you.