Thermonuclear Reactor To Use Coconut Shells

destinyland writes "A key component of a $10 billion nuclear fusion plant is vintage 2002 Indonesian coconut-shell charcoal. After a 20-year search, German researchers discovered that the coconut-shell charcoal is the best medium for 'adsorbing' waste byproducts sucked out of the thermonuclear reactor's vacuum chamber. In what will be the first fusion power facility that's commercially viable, magnetic fields will heat hydrogen isotopes to over 150 million degrees Centigrade. (Essentially, the super-hot plasma creates artificial stars.) As the article points out, 'It's not quite a Starship warp drive, but it does harness the power of the sun.'"

Comments

Re:commercially viable ?

[Anonymous Coward]

The 'containment shell' you are speaking of is called the thermal shield, and it is 10 inches of solid carbon steel (usually A36). First, the inside few inches may undergo embrittlement over the course of decades. There is still plenty of ductile material left to hold things together. Second, there will be literally no mechanical stresses in the thermal shield other than gravity... seems like 10 inches of steel ought to be able to hold itself up. It will see thermal stresses, but it is designed with expansion joints so that these to not convert into mechanical stresses. Finally, if these reactors follow any sort of conventional fission reactor design (they will), there will then be 6 feet of steel reinforced high density concrete surrounding the entire reaction chamber, called the 'bioshield'.

There is a lot of information on reactor design out there if you just look and educate yourself instead of reading an editorial and jumping to conclusions. the DOE's websites have a lot of non-classified documents out for public use.