Archived New design could finally help to bring fusion power closer to reality (phys.org)
submitted ago by MichaelTen
Posted by: MichaelTen
Posting time: 5.3 years ago on
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Archived on: 2/12/2017 1:51:00 AM
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Archived New design could finally help to bring fusion power closer to reality (phys.org)
submitted ago by MichaelTen
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[–] VictorSteinerDavion 0 points 5 points 5 points (+5|-0) ago
Amount of fuel available to sustain the reaction.
Like gas in a car, the fuel has to be pumped in for it to work.
If one of these blows up it can only burn up the fuel currently in the system, where fission reactors have ALL of the fuel available the entire time, which allows for run away reactions like fukushima and chernobyl.
Any explosion in a fusion system will be a very bad thing of course and if the shielding fails a pulse of radiation will get out and destroy a bunch of stuff, but it won't leave a pile of long term pollution behind messing up the place for centuries.
A fusion system blowing up would not be much different than an oil refinery blowing up, and that happens all the time.
[–] CatNamedJava 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago
Gen 4 reactor can turn themselves off during a failure so chernobil is not possible with the new ones. Plus the entire US nuclear waste can fit inside a footbal field. Most waste are just sitting next to the plant waiting for gen 4 reactors to come online to recycle the waste.
[–] anustart2015 ago
Source?
[–] Probably_insane 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago (edited ago)
I see, so it's still dangerous, just nowhere near as dangerous as it could be in a fission reactor, mainly due to the lack of nuclear fallout?
I guess that's slightly more reassuring
[–] VictorSteinerDavion 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
Basically yes to all that.
Anything that involves lots of energy is dangerous in one way or another and it's up to us to make sure we asses the risk properly and plan for disasters and mitigate forseable errors.
Both major nuclear fission disasters happened because we didn't do that properly.