3 ms·
Modular sections are pulled out and the first wall is replaced. Most of the section is put back in. You can pipeline this (like how any industrial process or
by willis936 5y ago
Modular sections are pulled out and the first wall is replaced. Most of the section is put back in. You can pipeline this (like how any industrial process or digital processor works) to make the maintenance take a matter of days. The old material is low-level radioactive waste for less than a hundred years, then it's just metal. A 25 Bn USD 1 GWe plant could have 5 reactors and only need 3 to operate at max load continuously.
A tritium leak is orders of magnitude less worse than a fission meltdown in terms of poisoning the water table. In the absolute worst case the exclusion zone lasts 100 years.
A tritum or molten salt leak also trivial to contain compared to a fission meltdown. Ten feet of concrete. This is reflected in lower costs to build and relative ease to comply with regulation. Draw me the scenario where there is an explosion that cannot be contained by existing engineered solutions.
Your most reliable product is FUD and misinformation born of confident ignorance. You really ought to stop until you know more.
- pfdietz 5y ago> a matter of days Simply cooling the magnets back to operating temperature will take longer than that. ITER's coils will take a month to cool down from room temperature. The problem with leaks isn't so much that tritium is dangerous; the problem is that a leak (of coolant, or air) into the vacuum vessel destroys the ability of the fusion reactor to function at all. One of the big problems with fusion that Lidsky pointed out is they cram all this complexity into a space that's off limits to people (due to induced radioactivity). Anything breaks there, even something minor? Time consuming pain. Abdou has put up numbers on estimated MTBF and MTTR for fusion reactors that given uptimes of maybe 4%.