A helium-resistant material could finally usher in the age of nuclear fusion (opens in new tab)

Oh, your sentence explained to me something I had never understood. Alpha radiation is harmful because the helium nucleus acquires an electronic, becomes helium that tries to escape? I always thought it was just the impact of the particle that caused damage but now I understand better, thanks!

Can you confirm if I'm understanding the paper properly?

My read on this is that they've found a way to use layers in the material to make the Helium from alpha particles form little tubes on their way through the metal to escape, rather than building up into little balls that cause blisters and weaken the metal.

polyproplene tubing lets helium pass through, which is why helium is used as a sparging gas in high performance liquid chromatography.

Yes, that surprised me too. Are there any fusion designs without high vacuum?

But on the other hand, magnetic stresses in full-scale systems would be huge, right? And one could consider that to be pressure. In that it reflects confinement of the plasma. Or it could be an incoherent edit.

> Seriously? Extreme pressures in a tokamak? What am I missing?

Maybe they're including stellarators, and other possible variations -- as the article didn't specify tokamaks.

Some, but not all, especially not the issue of fast neutrons turning whatever your make your reactor out of, into crumbly crap. Now, I know that some people are placing bets on forms of aneutronic fusion, but realistic forms still produce enough neutrons to ruin metal, that's just not their primary means of transmitting energy. Worse, they require temperatures/pressures far in excess of what's realistic any time soon, except possibly for very brief bursts in the lab.