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How To Line a Thermonuclear Reactor
sciencehabit writes "One of the biggest question marks hanging over the ITER fusion reactor project — a giant international collaboration currently under construction in France — is over what material to use for coating its interior wall. After all, the reactor has to withstand temperatures of 100,000C and an intense particle bombardment. Researchers have now answered that question by refitting the current world's largest fusion device, the Joint European Torus (JET) near Oxford, U.K., with a lining akin to the one planned for ITER. JET's new 'ITER-like wall,' a combination of tungsten and beryllium, is eroding more slowly (PDF) and retaining less of the fuel than the lining used on earlier fusion reactors, the team reports."
This is known as the "first wall" problem in fusion reactors. It's good to hear there's been progress.
It's discouraging to hear how slow progress is on ITER.
Solar is orders of magnitude simpler in technological complexity, but economic return on solar is just starting to happen. Not because of the technology, simply because population is growing and the cheaper black shit is running out.
Same thing with Fusion. Technologically, we have enough engineers and scientists in the world to make it a world-scale Apollo type endeavour and get Fusion to market by 2020-2030.... if we wanted to. But honestly, the economy doesn't want to. Not until it runs out of whatever is cheaper.
What material can withstand 100,000C ???
The pastry wrapping a McDonalds Apple Pie.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
It's not supposed to work economically, experiments are like that.
Troll harder next time.
Twenty years ago I was a program officer at the Office of Fusion Energy, US Department of Energy. The ITER planning had started. My take -- there is no way on Earth that a tokamak can be cost competitive. Even if it works, even if the first wall problem is solved as may be indicated above, the engineering costs are so prohibitive as to price the whole concept out of consideration.
I earlier worked on Trisops, a simpler fusion concept that might be economically feasible, but I even doubt that. In the official fusion community, which is fixated on the the tokamak, it suffered from the NIH ( Not Invented Here ) syndrome and was defunded.