Well, that's nuclear for you. The consequences for failure are so much higher.
And from a meta standpoint - nobody wants nuclear weapons in Fenspace.
I'll clean it up and wikify it - eventually. OTOH, if I ever bothered to flesh it out the plan to replace the Roughrider's engine cores involved replacing Frigga's dangerous Stellerators with 4, new Fission reactors derived from the ultra-safe CANDU system, to run on natural Uranium - using a graphite calandria and a direct-cylcle turbine to get it built quickly. And then run it on a cycle to make either reactor-grade plutonium (Definitely not bomb-useable), or Mox fuel.
Mox Fuel. Put some Moxxie in your Blackbird
Anyway. Because my slush pile around this was masssive.
------Care and feeding of your Fusion reactor.
The first question I ask him.
---Why?
I loved the idea of having my own personal sun. It’s the same basic process you see. Hydrogen atoms fuse together to make Helium with a big burst of energy. It’s the basic power process of the universe and it was real and in my hands.
The reactor didn’t fake it. It really did it.
How handwavium works. It’s not real, really. It just sort of fakes it - fake it until you make it. There were places where it needed a light wave here or there - to make the magnets work, or the ash ejectors, but right at the core.
It was a real thing, that needed real expertise and real control
We wanted to be that good. To be really good.”
---- Okay. So, how does a reactor like this one work?
“Okay. Atoms don’t normally like coming together, they tend to repel each other. But if you get them hot enough - literally as hot as the core of the sun, and get them moving fast enough - then they crash together and stick. If the atoms are small and light enough then you can get more energy out of it than you put in.
Instead of hydrogen like the sun, the reactor used Deuterium and Tritium - types of hydrogen that were heavier than normal and more likely to crash together.
Even then we needed the most powerful man-made magnetic field in the universe and electrical currents measured in mega-amps to get it to even light off and once it was going it took absolute precision to keep it stable.
It would always try and shutdown - push it too far in any direction and it’d fall into a negative spiral that’d stall the reactor. It’s not like a Chernobyl reactor - it can’t really run away. It’s always self-defeating.
The reaction accelerates as you add fuel - but if you add too much fuel you flood the core with more than it can burn and cool the reaction too much. If you cool the reaction it can’t burn as much fuel and it stalls.
As the reaction accelerates, it burns more fuel and turns it into helium - we call it ash. The more ash you have in a core, the hotter it has to be to burn fuel - but too much ash will choke the reactor. You have to get rid of it - but not all of it. Too little and the fusion happens at too cool a temperature and the reactor’s easy to flood - or it floods itself.
The reactor is always trying to stall, and the higher the power the easier it is to stall it. It’s like it’s on a hill and, not only does the slope get steeper, but gravity gets stronger the higher up it goes. It all about balance, and keeping that balance.
The computer could control it and ‘run’ it safely - but to get the best out of it - to light it off and get it up to maximum and keep it there we needed to be good. The computer would always stall it or shut down early.
But we understood what we were doing. We weren’t reckless. We weren’t incompetent. The whole time we knew exactly what we were doing”
----What were you doing?
It was a safety test.
----A safety test?
The reactor we have - you can’t just shut it down. It’s not like a fission reactor where you push the red button and it stops in seconds.
The reaction is always trying to stop itself - but on its own it takes minutes for it to do it. If something is going wrong in the steam circuit and it’s loosing coolant, that’s too long - the reactor core would be damaged irreparably.
We needed a way to actually kill the reaction. To stop it dead.
We did that by collapsing the magnetic field that contained it. We did that by boiling off the helium that cooled the superconducting magnets that maintained the field, so that the dump-shunt quenched and de-energised the magnets. The field would collapse, the fuel in the core would expand and cool, and the reaction would stall
The test was run at full power, because the reactor would actually shut-down faster. The more higher up the power - the steeper the slope.
The problem was, there was a flaw with this.
----And that flaw was the heating system?
Not the heaters - the batteries. If we still had power from the main station grid we were fine - we could dump all the power we wanted into them. They’d boil in seconds.
But - if we lost grid power at the same time then we needed the backup generators which took time to start. To get through that minute we had batteries.
The problem was, the batteries had degraded - they couldn’t put as much current through the heater coils. It took longer and longer to boil off until eventually it could take too long and the reactor would overheat.
We didn’t imagine this was possible. It shouldn’t have been
---- You think it shouldn’t have been possible? Why?
It shouldn’t have been. Not according to the manual. Not according to design. Something failed inside the reactor. The reactor failed us.
---- So how does a Fusion reactor explode?
-----------------------
And from a meta standpoint - nobody wants nuclear weapons in Fenspace.
I'll clean it up and wikify it - eventually. OTOH, if I ever bothered to flesh it out the plan to replace the Roughrider's engine cores involved replacing Frigga's dangerous Stellerators with 4, new Fission reactors derived from the ultra-safe CANDU system, to run on natural Uranium - using a graphite calandria and a direct-cylcle turbine to get it built quickly. And then run it on a cycle to make either reactor-grade plutonium (Definitely not bomb-useable), or Mox fuel.
Mox Fuel. Put some Moxxie in your Blackbird
Anyway. Because my slush pile around this was masssive.
------Care and feeding of your Fusion reactor.
The first question I ask him.
---Why?
I loved the idea of having my own personal sun. It’s the same basic process you see. Hydrogen atoms fuse together to make Helium with a big burst of energy. It’s the basic power process of the universe and it was real and in my hands.
The reactor didn’t fake it. It really did it.
How handwavium works. It’s not real, really. It just sort of fakes it - fake it until you make it. There were places where it needed a light wave here or there - to make the magnets work, or the ash ejectors, but right at the core.
It was a real thing, that needed real expertise and real control
We wanted to be that good. To be really good.”
---- Okay. So, how does a reactor like this one work?
“Okay. Atoms don’t normally like coming together, they tend to repel each other. But if you get them hot enough - literally as hot as the core of the sun, and get them moving fast enough - then they crash together and stick. If the atoms are small and light enough then you can get more energy out of it than you put in.
Instead of hydrogen like the sun, the reactor used Deuterium and Tritium - types of hydrogen that were heavier than normal and more likely to crash together.
Even then we needed the most powerful man-made magnetic field in the universe and electrical currents measured in mega-amps to get it to even light off and once it was going it took absolute precision to keep it stable.
It would always try and shutdown - push it too far in any direction and it’d fall into a negative spiral that’d stall the reactor. It’s not like a Chernobyl reactor - it can’t really run away. It’s always self-defeating.
The reaction accelerates as you add fuel - but if you add too much fuel you flood the core with more than it can burn and cool the reaction too much. If you cool the reaction it can’t burn as much fuel and it stalls.
As the reaction accelerates, it burns more fuel and turns it into helium - we call it ash. The more ash you have in a core, the hotter it has to be to burn fuel - but too much ash will choke the reactor. You have to get rid of it - but not all of it. Too little and the fusion happens at too cool a temperature and the reactor’s easy to flood - or it floods itself.
The reactor is always trying to stall, and the higher the power the easier it is to stall it. It’s like it’s on a hill and, not only does the slope get steeper, but gravity gets stronger the higher up it goes. It all about balance, and keeping that balance.
The computer could control it and ‘run’ it safely - but to get the best out of it - to light it off and get it up to maximum and keep it there we needed to be good. The computer would always stall it or shut down early.
But we understood what we were doing. We weren’t reckless. We weren’t incompetent. The whole time we knew exactly what we were doing”
----What were you doing?
It was a safety test.
----A safety test?
The reactor we have - you can’t just shut it down. It’s not like a fission reactor where you push the red button and it stops in seconds.
The reaction is always trying to stop itself - but on its own it takes minutes for it to do it. If something is going wrong in the steam circuit and it’s loosing coolant, that’s too long - the reactor core would be damaged irreparably.
We needed a way to actually kill the reaction. To stop it dead.
We did that by collapsing the magnetic field that contained it. We did that by boiling off the helium that cooled the superconducting magnets that maintained the field, so that the dump-shunt quenched and de-energised the magnets. The field would collapse, the fuel in the core would expand and cool, and the reaction would stall
The test was run at full power, because the reactor would actually shut-down faster. The more higher up the power - the steeper the slope.
The problem was, there was a flaw with this.
----And that flaw was the heating system?
Not the heaters - the batteries. If we still had power from the main station grid we were fine - we could dump all the power we wanted into them. They’d boil in seconds.
But - if we lost grid power at the same time then we needed the backup generators which took time to start. To get through that minute we had batteries.
The problem was, the batteries had degraded - they couldn’t put as much current through the heater coils. It took longer and longer to boil off until eventually it could take too long and the reactor would overheat.
We didn’t imagine this was possible. It shouldn’t have been
---- You think it shouldn’t have been possible? Why?
It shouldn’t have been. Not according to the manual. Not according to design. Something failed inside the reactor. The reactor failed us.
---- So how does a Fusion reactor explode?
-----------------------
I love the smell of rotaries in the morning. You know one time, I got to work early, before the rush hour. I walked through the empty carpark, I didn't see one bloody Prius or Golf. And that smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole carpark, smelled like.... ....speed.
One day they're going to ban them.