Does anyone know how do scientists measure such high temperatures?
I doubt a regular thermometer will scale at such levels.
I doubt a regular thermometer will scale at such levels.
https://www.scienceinschool.org/article/2013/fusion-4/
Incidentally, the plasma is of such low density (ie. few particles) that it has little stored heat energy. As soon as the plasma touches anything it cools down and fusion stops. You're unlikely to get a mushroom cloud out of today's fusion reactors, as there is just not enough stored energy in them. (Might that change if they are scaled to the point where large amounts of energy can be extracted, a bit like the bang out of a large charged capacitor?)
I believe the chambers are operated at a pressure of 1/10,000th of an atmosphere.
Edit: A bit more searching turned up an answer. It's a neutron absorber. So it's used as a shield to stop the neutrons leaving the reactor?
Extracting parts-per-billion of tritium distributed throughout thousands of tons of hot, brittle, radioactive, super-flammable LiH would be no picnic. Melting it probably would not make that easier.
Fortunately, no one will need to.
Hundreds of tons of deuterium in your thousands of tons of terrifyingly inflammable LiD would be expensive. But if we balk at expense, we won't get fusion power.
Most of us do, in fact, balk at expense, for reasons. But the topic here is what would be needed for fusion to be made to work at all. $2B worth of deuterium to help breed tritium is not much for a $100B fusion plant.
Extracting your few grams of tritium every day from a thousand tons of LiD may be called somebody else's problem.
The blanket is lithium hydride, not hydroxide.
Some people talk about adding beryllium.