As a night baker I have a lot of time during the night and sometimes I actually remember to ask the dope…
Earlier in the night I had heard a BBC report on burial practices around the world, and the subject of cremation came up. As would be expected cremation has its environmental downsides and the world doesn’t need more stuff polluting the air.
Getting to my question: Say fusion power(the high temperature type) was practical and common. I happen to be a wealthy fusion power magnate and can modify one of my manymy tokamak as I see fit. Unfortunately, I’m dead. In my will I’ve elected to have my body consumed by 100 million degrees Celsius plasma. Supposing that the plasma could be shunted somehow, what would my body be reduced to, would anything be left? Would my corpse be able to contribute to the power output in some tiny way?
The mass of the plasma would be fairly small compared to your body mass. You, the cold dead stiff, will quickly quench the plasma’s temp. It’s not really much different than what would happen if the reactor lost magnetic confinement. The plasma quickly cools down below fusion temperatures when it comes into contact with the reactor walls.
Even as a thought experiment it’s hard to visualize this. But a temperature of multi-million degrees would strip the body down to its component atoms, and then strip the electrons off the nuclei, this being the definition of a plasma.
There’s not enough concentrated deuterium or tritium in the body to make any appreciable difference to the heating.
I can’t understand why you’d want to go the Tokamak route, though. Obviously laser fusion is what you’d want.
You’d be reduced to a little, black rock (similar to obsidian and about a size that would fit in your palm). Your output would be minimal, because chambers like this are designed to burn up trash and other junk, not collect energy. Saw it on a show back in, like, 2009.
