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I don't disagree with this statement, fusion researchers do care about energy loss when they're evaluating fusion reactor feasibility. They talk more about neut
by minetest2048 2y ago
I don't disagree with this statement, fusion researchers do care about energy loss when they're evaluating fusion reactor feasibility. They talk more about neutron loss, bremsstrahlung radiation and synchrotron radiation instead of blackbody radiation. A paper on this: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.06251 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.06251
So I did some searching, and found this stack exchange asking this question: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/415028/how-do-fusion-reactors-deal-with-blackbody-radiation https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/415028/how-do-fu... . They argued that because fusion reactor plasma is optically thin, it doesn't radiate following blackbody radiation law. This textbook also say that:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/physics-of-plasmas/plasma-radiation/978D783820B7C6CCF55F40582B9E2816 https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/physics-of-plasmas/...
I tried to search more about plasma energy losses, and it becomes extremely complicated with insane amount of equations. One thing that I can get is that you can't model fusion reactor plasmas as a blackbody radiator because plasma is that complicated. If plasma is simpler then we should either have fusion already or we have given up on fusion research a long time ago
- pbmonster 2y ago> because fusion reactor plasma is optically thin, it doesn't radiate following blackbody radiation law. It still follows the laws of blackbody radiation - it's just that the emissivity of the body is part of the equation. A classical blackbody has a emissivity of 1. This means not only that it absorbs radiation really well, it also means it's really good at radiating energy away. Things that have low emissivity (all things transparent and all things reflective) are also really bad at radiating energy away. This is used for solar-thermal collectors today: you make them from an engineered material that is completely black at in the visible range, but highly reflective in the infra-red. That way, they absorb sunlight and get hot, but they don't lose heat energy because they can't radiate it away as heat radiation. And yes, fusion plasma is extremely, extremely transparent. Not only is it extremely thin (ITER or Wendeltstein 7-X contain only 1-2g of hydrogen during operation), hydrogen is also extremely bad at absorbing gamma-rays (black body radiation at 1e8 K).