3 ms·
When the thousands of tons of lithium hydroxide catch fire, you will notice.
by ncmncm 4y ago
When the thousands of tons of lithium hydroxide catch fire, you will notice.
- pfdietz 4y agoHaving lithium hydroxide catch fire would be quite a trick. Are you mixing it with chlorine trifluoride?
- ncmncm 4y agoLithium hydride. The oxide is what you get after it explodes.
- pfdietz 4y agoI don't think LiH makes sense in a DT fusion reactor blanket. Neutron economy there is very important, and H will absorb some neutrons.
- ncmncm 4y agoIf the H in your LiH is deuterium, absorbing neutrons would be OK, because that makes tritium. Not quite as much as lithium absorbing them, but better than anything else. Hundreds of tons of deuterium in your thousands of tons of terrifyingly inflammable LiD would be expensive. But if we balk at expense, we won't get fusion power. Most of us do, in fact, balk at expense, for reasons. But the topic here is what would be needed for fusion to be made to work at all. $2B worth of deuterium to help breed tritium is not much for a $100B fusion plant. Extracting your few grams of tritium every day from a thousand tons of LiD may be called somebody else's problem.
- femto 4y agoWhat's lithium hydroxide used for in fusion reactors? Edit: A bit more searching turned up an answer. It's a neutron absorber. So it's used as a shield to stop the neutrons leaving the reactor?
- ncmncm 4y agoThe lithium + neutrons would breed the tritium you need for fuel to burn tomorrow. Extracting parts-per-billion of tritium distributed throughout thousands of tons of hot, brittle, radioactive, super-flammable LiH would be no picnic. Melting it probably would not make that easier. Fortunately, no one will need to.
- ncmncm 4y agoOops, autocorrect strikes again. The blanket is lithium hydride, not hydroxide. Some people talk about adding beryllium.