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by ncmncm 1379 days ago
When the thousands of tons of lithium hydroxide catch fire, you will notice.
3 comments

Having lithium hydroxide catch fire would be quite a trick. Are you mixing it with chlorine trifluoride?
Lithium hydride. The oxide is what you get after it explodes.
I don't think LiH makes sense in a DT fusion reactor blanket. Neutron economy there is very important, and H will absorb some neutrons.
If the H in your LiH is deuterium, absorbing neutrons would be OK, because that makes tritium. Not quite as much as lithium absorbing them, but better than anything else.

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.

What's lithium hydroxide used for in fusion reactors?

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?

The lithium + neutrons would breed the tritium you need for fuel to burn tomorrow.

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.

Oops, autocorrect strikes again.

The blanket is lithium hydride, not hydroxide.

Some people talk about adding beryllium.