Foreseeable thermal, mechanical, and materials engineering problems of fusion reactor power plants Page: 3 of 31
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power plant that would produce electricity at fuel costs of only 0.006 mil/
kWhr, or about li of the cost of the basic fuel for fission reactors. Further
the potential supply of fuel for fusion reactors is enormous - there is suf-
ficient heavy hydrogen in the world's oceans so that if only half of it were
employee, it would serve to provide all of the world's energy needs at 10
times the level anticipated for the year 2000 for a period much longer than
our sun is expected to last.a Inasmuch as water is available to everyone, a
practicable fusion power system would eliminate competition for the world's
limited reserves of fossil fuel and thus should help greatly to reduce inter-
national tensions. Further, inasmuch as the product of the fusion reaction
ie helium there would be no long-lived fission products. There would, of
course, be activated structure as a consequence of the copious production of
neutrons, and it would be necessary, at lea: L for the first few generations
of nuclear power plants, to employ tritium with deuterium as the fuel, and
this will introduce some difficult '.sdiological safety problems in handling
the volatile, radioactive tritium. howeverr, conceptual design studies indi-
cate that it nay be possible to keep the inventory of volatile radioactive
material in a fusion reactor sufficiently low that it will represent a bio-
logical hazard potential about 1 millionth that in a fission reactor, and, by
proper design, activation of the structure might be kept sufficiently low so
that the inventory of non-volatile radioactive material would be of the order
of 1i of that in a fission reactor.3 Thus, there is a whole set of extremely
important incentives to obtain viable engineering solutions to the design of
fusion reactors assuming that the plasma physics problems can be resolved
satisfactorily.
BSIC COCEPTS
Half a dozen different basic concepts for confining the high .temperature
plasm of a fusion reactor are under active developent.' Although some of
the problems of these different concepts are quite specialized and peculiar
to only one or a few concepts, most of the problems to one degree or another
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Fraas, A. P. Foreseeable thermal, mechanical, and materials engineering problems of fusion reactor power plants, report, January 1, 1972; Tennessee. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1035497/m1/3/: accessed May 7, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Government Documents Department.