5 ms·

To be remembered down through the ages as the Great Vaporization of Brooklyn, August 3rd, 2011.

sbierwagen 15y ago
Nope. Fusion reactors are fundamentally different from fission reactors. You have to get a tenuous wisp of hydrogen (the reactor in this particular experiment was running at 10 mTorr, or 0.0013% atmospheric pressure) very, very hot, and keep it away from solid matter, which is millions of degrees of colder than the fuel plasma, and will suck all of the energy out of the reaction. You shut off the containment coils, and tremendously hot plasma ions leap away from each other, instantly stopping the reaction. If the reaction somehow "runs away", which it absolutely can't, then it brushes the walls of the vacuum chamber, poisoning it with cold metal ions, like injecting lead shavings that have been chilled to absolute zero directly into your heart. If our magical "runaway reaction" somehow overcomes this, and melts a hole in the vacuum chamber, then the atmosphere rushes in, both freezing cold and at intolerably high pressure, like the North Sea flooding into the hull of a submarine resting on the ocean floor. Fusion reactors don't melt down, or explode. At all. It just can't happen, much like how a Yugo rear-ending a garbage truck in Brooklyn doesn't instantly consume all of New York City in a gasoline fireball. It is indicative of the great difficulty of both starting and sustaining a fusion reaction that the only fusion reactions which produced more energy than they consumed, that have ever taken place on Earth were powered by atomic bombs, and still only ran for fractions of a second.
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  Way to inject lead shavings that have been chilled to absolute zero directly into the best joke I've heard today :)
- jcrites 15y ago
  It's worth calling out that a cubic meter of the sun's fusion reaction generates about the same power as an active compost heap. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#Core http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#Core - the huge energy output is due to the huge volume
  - Eliezer 15y ago
    That really surprised me until I looked it up, and read in Wikipedia that "At the center of the Sun, theoretical models estimate it to be approximately 276.5 watts/m3, a power production density that more nearly approximates reptile metabolism than a thermonuclear bomb" and realized a few seconds later that an object with a thermonuclear bomb's power generation density, the size of the Sun, would not look like a thumb-sized blazing ball of fire from 93 million miles away. It would look like a supernova, and explode around as fast.
  - hugh3 15y ago
    Thankyou, I have a new favourite fun fact.
  - arethuza 15y ago
    The Soviet Tsar Bomb had a power output of 5.4 yottawatts - apparently about 1% of solar power output. Of course, this was for a pretty short time, 39 nanoseconds, but it is still rather impressive. http://digg.com/news/story/The_Most_Powerful_Device_Ever_Utilized_1_of_the_Sun_s_Power_Output http://digg.com/news/story/The_Most_Powerful_Device_Ever_Uti...

Nope. Fusion reactors are fundamentally different from fission reactors. You have to get a tenuous wisp of hydrogen (the reactor in this particular experiment was running at 10 mTorr, or 0.0013% atmospheric pressure) very, very hot, and keep it away from solid matter, which is millions of degrees of colder than the fuel plasma, and will suck all of the energy out of the reaction. You shut off the containment coils, and tremendously hot plasma ions leap away from each other, instantly stopping the reaction. If the reaction somehow "runs away", which it absolutely can't, then it brushes the walls of the vacuum chamber, poisoning it with cold metal ions, like injecting lead shavings that have been chilled to absolute zero directly into your heart. If our magical "runaway reaction" somehow overcomes this, and melts a hole in the vacuum chamber, then the atmosphere rushes in, both freezing cold and at intolerably high pressure, like the North Sea flooding into the hull of a submarine resting on the ocean floor. Fusion reactors don't melt down, or explode. At all. It just can't happen, much like how a Yugo rear-ending a garbage truck in Brooklyn doesn't instantly consume all of New York City in a gasoline fireball. It is indicative of the great difficulty of both starting and sustaining a fusion reaction that the only fusion reactions which produced more energy than they consumed, that have ever taken place on Earth were powered by atomic bombs, and still only ran for fractions of a second.

sliverstorm 15y ago
Way to inject lead shavings that have been chilled to absolute zero directly into the best joke I've heard today :)
jcrites 15y ago
It's worth calling out that a cubic meter of the sun's fusion reaction generates about the same power as an active compost heap. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#Core http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#Core - the huge energy output is due to the huge volume
- Eliezer 15y ago
  That really surprised me until I looked it up, and read in Wikipedia that "At the center of the Sun, theoretical models estimate it to be approximately 276.5 watts/m3, a power production density that more nearly approximates reptile metabolism than a thermonuclear bomb" and realized a few seconds later that an object with a thermonuclear bomb's power generation density, the size of the Sun, would not look like a thumb-sized blazing ball of fire from 93 million miles away. It would look like a supernova, and explode around as fast.
- hugh3 15y ago
  Thankyou, I have a new favourite fun fact.
- arethuza 15y ago
  The Soviet Tsar Bomb had a power output of 5.4 yottawatts - apparently about 1% of solar power output. Of course, this was for a pretty short time, 39 nanoseconds, but it is still rather impressive. http://digg.com/news/story/The_Most_Powerful_Device_Ever_Utilized_1_of_the_Sun_s_Power_Output http://digg.com/news/story/The_Most_Powerful_Device_Ever_Uti...