Comment by MisterTea
6 hours ago
No melt down? This game sucks.
On a serious note: I wonder how practical and safe it would be to build fusion pants close to city centers in order to harvest the excess heat for district heating. Would be a boon in e.g. NYC which already has a large district steam system. You can do cooling too, look up "steam absorption chiller."
It already exists in many countries. They transport it through pipelines .
E.g. Temelín Nuclear Power Plant, Paks Nuclear Power Plant And many more
> I wonder how practical and safe it would be to build fusion pants close to city centers in order to harvest the excess heat for district heating
The cost/benefit for doing this seems pretty similar between fusion as gas power. We don't usually do this with gas, so I guess it's probably not viable for fusion.
Combined heat and electricity production is uncommon in the US, but much more so in Europe. Especially in the Baltics, Scandinavia and the Netherlands, non-CHP generation is rare. Related: higher energy cost, and elaborate local heat distribution networks.
Don't they already do this for existing types of power plants (gas, coal) that produce waste heat?
Fusion power plants can't "melt down". The amount of plasma inside the vacuum chamber is just around a gram.
That's the joke, isn't it?
A fission power plant simulator lets you have fun playing through a meltdown disaster scenario. A fusion power plant simulator is "worse" because it takes away the "fun" of meltdowns. The humor is in reacting to the simulator as if it were a game (some are, but this one isn't).
Might not be similar to nuclear meltdown but still enough to need a lot of money to fix
> Fusion power plants can't "melt down"
Eh, a core-containment failure (in any magnetically-contained system) would involve superheated hydrogen getting friendly with oxygen. That, in turn, would give neutron-impregnated barrier materials a free ride on propellant. It's not strictly a melt down. But it's in the same practical category of failure.
Ths is a massive misunderstanding of the technology. First of all, the amount of hydrogen in the reactor is tiny. The magnetic confinement severely limits the density of the plasma. The inner containment vessel is a ultra high vacuum chamber. The chemical energy that would be released by a reaction between the hydrogen in the reactor amd oxygen from the air would be less than what is released by popping a hydrogen filled balloon with a lighter.
The truly concerning failure modes would be related to release of radiation or activated materials. But that would require damaging the reactor in ways that the reactor is incapable of imparting on itself.
Overall, the technology is remarkably safe.
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There's only a few grams of hydrogen in the reactor's plasma, it's reaction with oxygen wouldn't be much more exciting than just losing containment. There are engineering challenges that have to be addressed but no worse than the 6 MW research reactor I used to walk by every day to my college classes in the middle of a dense city.
The proliferation risk of someone using the neutron flux to produce an atomic or dirty bomb are real but that exists no matter where it is.
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What's the effect of this in a populated area in a certain radius? Compared to nuclear power plants...
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