what would happen if a fully operational fusion reactor exploded in the possibly worst way?

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what would happen if a fully operational fusion reactor exploded in the possibly worst way?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Since fusion requires (at least now) and extremely high energy input – the reaction would just stop

Anonymous 0 Comments

It can’t really explode. The fusion reaction requires extremely high temperatures to keep running. If the reactor is damaged, that temperature would immediately drop and that would stop the reaction. So some plasma might escape, some part of the reactor and/or the power station would melt and/or burn, but that’s it. There are also no long-lived radioactive isotopes in a fusion reactor, so no permanent environment damage. Also I should probably add that there are currently no working fusion reactors with positive energy output, so it’s all a bit theoretical at this point.

Anonymous 0 Comments

the worst possible outcome is, that you just blew a fucking expensive piece of technology. And maybe the lights won’t turn on until you fix it.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The only really explosive thing in there is the hydrogen, which could produce a nasty mundane fire on a par with a gas-fired power station.

This would shut off the fuel or power supply to the fusion, which would blow out like a candle.

I guess some designs might use liquid metal coolant, which could produce poisonous smoke if it caught fire?

Anonymous 0 Comments

The current biggest fusion reactors have enough fuel in its core to generate about a gigajoule of energy. It all that was released at once it would have roughly the energy of 200 kg of TNT. Normally it discharges over almost two minutes. The entire fusion reaction takes place in about 15 minutes normally. So having it all release at once is unrealistic. But even if that were to happen the resulting explosion could not get larger then a medium sized bomb.

As for radioactivity a fusion reactor does not really generate the same kind of long lived radioactive minerals that a fission reactor can make. There may be some radioactive materials being created but not the same type and not in nearly the same quantities.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Upside to fusion reactors, they can’t really run away

Fusion doesn’t want to keep going. The hot atoms push each other away and only a small fraction succeed at fusing so as soon as the pressure that’s forcing them together goes away the fusion stops and the plasma dissipates. Its a couple grams at most of hot gas being pushed into a super tight ring (tokamak style) but when it expands to fill the toroid the temperature will drop dramatically and nothing will really happen

The most dramatic way for a fusion reactor to “explode” is for cooling on the superconducting magnets to be abruptly lost. If they get too warm they stop having 0 resistance and suddenly have resistance so the stupid high current flowing through them now generates an insane amount of power, promptly boiling off all the surrounding coolant, seriously damaging the magnet, and possibly venting a lot of helium or nitrogen from a sealed casing

That’s it. The worst it can really do is *pop* and require expensive and time consuming repairs, but no one outside the facility would be endangered by anything other than power failure.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Nothing much, the worst thing that may happen is that the immense heat damages the reactor and it will no longer function so the plasma starts cooling down in a few seconds you are left with a reactor to repair.

Anonymous 0 Comments

You break your reactor. That’s about it. You probably won’t even lose containment. A similar thing happened at one of the test fusion reactors a few years ago (I think maybe it was one in Los Angeles?), it just burnt the crap out of the inside of it and destroyed a bunch of expensive stuff.

Fusion reactors can produce a lot of power, but they don’t need much plasma to do it. Once that magnetic field turns off, your fusion stops. Then you just have an uncontained hot plasma while, while it might be tens or hundreds of millions of degrees, there’s not much of it, so the total energy released isn’t going to be substantial in the grand scheme of things.

Fusion reactors are incapable of exploding or melting down like a fission reactor Chernobyl style or exploding like a thermonuclear bomb.