'Super Steel' Sought For Fusion Reactors

This is big nonsense!

Everybody who has a BS or Ms or PHD in mechanical engineering should know that strength is going down with temperature.

Material specialists will know since 1948 that there are some high temperature alloys especially those used for turbine blades that combine high temperature strength with creep resistance and hot-gas corrosion resistance.

Cause for breakdown of twin-towers and building 7 are still debated as there may be 2 different mechanism: loss of strength with temperature and subsequent buckling or expansion with temperature and deformation and failure of vertical to horizontal column joints. There is an extended report from NIST on this topic regarding building 7 collapse 7 hours later than twin towers.

Material necessities for a future fusion reactor will be totally different:

The ring-tube of the reactor will have a blanket from Lithium as this is absorbing most of the high intensity neutron flux and converting this into Tritium that is part of the fusion reaction.

Lithium is melting at low temperatures so this is contradicting the necessity of a very hot wall to have a high temperature to heat the outside water.

The JET machine where the fusion burnt for 1 second did not have this, so the neutron flux was absorbed by the walls and did a considerable activation: the absorbed neutrons will produce first isotopes of the wall material and subsequent radioactive decay will produce other elements that are radioactive too.

This 1 second burning did create so much radioactivity that it is never more allowed to come near.

As we need 30 years of operation of a fusion reactor this will be a burning time of 10⁹ seconds.

We can allow this tube to be highly radioactive after use but the high intensity neutron irradiation may produce brittleness in the tube and may produce excess radioactivity. Both to be avoid.

Needed: medium temperature good strength material (at 500 to 700°C), highly resistant to neutron irradiation, ultra-pure with respect to critical elements as cobalt).

These ultra-pure materials are not existing today. Purest metallic elements have 10^-6 impurities, alloys are worse, ordinary alloys are much worse.

(Only silicon available much purer).

There are well known materials that can fulfill the thermal requirements but the purity will be a very big challenge.

RHABE