whoa...thats impressive...but, what could have happened should it have gone wrong?!???!! :-/
Not much, considering the size of it. This is not a
fission reactor, remember... a lot of heat and some radioactivity, but very very different (and much safer) than a fission reactor, in terms of the nature of the reaction and how it's done.
Worst case scenario would be a large magnet chamber coming apart, but this would be on a par with any "acceptable" heavy-industry accident, with damage and injuries only within the facility.
In fact, when a large experimental reactors of this type is run, they don't exactly lean on it and chat over coffee and donuts... they get well clear.
From Wikipedia:
"The likelihood of a catastrophic accident in a fusion reactor in which injury or loss of life occurs is much smaller than that of a fission reactor. The primary reason is that the fuel contained in the reaction chamber is only enough to sustain the reaction for about a minute, whereas a fission reactor contains about a year's supply of fuel. Furthermore, fusion requires very extreme and precisely controlled conditions of temperature, pressure and magnetic field parameters. If the reactor were damaged, these would be disrupted and the reaction would be rapidly quenched (extinguished).
Although the plasma in a fusion power plant will have a volume of 1000 cubic meters or more, the density of the plasma is extremely low, and the total amount of fusion fuel in the vessel is very small. If the fuel supply is closed, the reaction stops within seconds. Fusion is not a chain reaction and therefore cannot run out of hand: under normal conditions, the fusion process runs at the fastest possible rate, and any deviation from this optimum leads to a decrease in energy production.
In the magnetic approach, strong fields are developed in coils that are held in place mechanically by the reactor structure. Failure of this structure could release this tension and allow the magnet to "explode" outward. The severity of this event would be similar to any other industrial accident, and could be effectively stopped with a containment building similar to those used in existing (fission) nuclear generators. The laser-driven inertial approach is generally lower-stress. Although failure of the reaction chamber is possible, simply stopping fuel delivery would prevent any sort of catastrophic failure.
Most reactor designs rely on the use of liquid lithium as both a coolant and a method for converting stray neutrons from the reaction into tritium, which is fed back into the reactor as fuel. Lithium is highly flammable, and in the case of a fire it is possible that the lithium stored on-site could be burned up and escape. In this case the tritium contents of the lithium would be released into the atmosphere, posing a radiation risk. However, calculations suggest that the total amount of tritium and other radioactive gases in a typical power plant would be so small, about 1 kg, that they would have diluted to legally acceptable limits by the time they blew as far as the plant's perimeter fence."
Posted: Sun Mar 18, 2007 6:23 pm
;D
