EES 0836 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Nuclear Fission Product, Thermonuclear Weapon, Iter
3 Apr 2016
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Lecture 11: far less than radioactive fission products, building stable nuclei (like 4he) Maybe our voices would be higher : tritium is only radioactive substance. Energy is low, half-life short: not much worry here: main concern is extra neutrons tagging onto local metal nuclei (in surrounding structure) and become radioactive. Key worry is structural degradation of containment: why don"t we embrace fusion, then, believe me, we would if we could, it"s a huge technological challenge, seemingly always 50 years from fruition. Must confine plasma at 50 million degrees!: 100 million degrees for d-d reaction. All the while providing fuel flow, heat extraction, tritium supply, etc. Hurdles in plasma dynamics: turbulence, etc: still pursued, but with decreased enthusiasm, increased skepticism. But man, the payoff is huge: clean, unlimited energy: fusion successes, fusion has been accomplished in labs, in big plasma machines called tokamaks. Got ~6 mw out of princeton tokamak in 1993.
