Energy Crisis Solved by Science

[Esotera]

Ugh.... *facepalm*

ALL man-made nuclear fusion reactions are not self-sustaining; period, end of story! They cannot maintain themselves if the critical systems that maintain the reaction breaks down. Should the magnetic field or containment vessel break down, the reaction will simply stop.

Sorry, I don't know that much about the specifics of fusion engineering, I see how that makes sense. Was just assuming that someone somewhere would manage to find a way to mess it up.

But incidentally, isn't the same supposed to be true of fission reactors? And we all know nothing has ever gone wrong with one of them...

 

[Sprinal]

THe problem with using a fission reactor is that many people cannot ever be convinced that it is safe.

I love it personally but others....

Coal has over 500 years supply within Australia (which also has 30% of the worlds Uranium).

The mining unions within Australia are also very powerful and would not support this in the slightest so good luck getting it through them either.

and China... At this rate by 2050 they will all be dead.

 

[Pat8u]

wait if everyone had solar power our energy crisis would be over I mean really think about it nothings more renewable than light also less powerplants= more housing space more housing space =more room for population more room for population = win

 

[Arakasi]

"Actinouranium" sounds like a plot device.

Mutant invasion ensues.

 

[Continuity]

This is cold fusion all over again...

No its regular fission.

This however is cold fusion "all over again":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Catalyzer

Difference is this time it looks like it works.

 

[JMeganSnow]

Actually, the best thing to do with the waste materials is to design your plant to keep the reaction going until they turn into lead, which is not radioactive.

Lead is radioactive. I don't know where you got the notion that it isn't, but it is. That's why lead paint isn't used anymore and why graphite is used instead of lead for pencils. People and animals were getting sick from radiation poisoning eating the paint chips and putting pencils near their mouths.

Wrong. They don't make lead paint because kids like to eat it, as it has a slight sweetness taste to it. And had you been paying attention in class, you'd realize that lead is toxic (poison), not radioactive. It builds up in your body and never leaves. Kind of like mercury, and other heavy metals.

EDIT: Yes, I realize that some isotopes of lead ARE unstable. However, no one, not even the Chinese, are stupid enough to use them in place of non radioactive lead. The radioactive decay of uranium does indeed make non-radiative lead isotopes. Check Wikipedia.

Heh, you said what I was about to say. Carry on.

I believe (don't quote me on this) that it's possible to find or make radioactive isotopes of any element--radioactivity is a result of the nucleus of the atom having too many neutrons or protons, which results in the atoms emitting them as alpha and beta particles and also producing gamma radiation. Heck, you can even get radioactive hydrogen (from "heavy water"). However, the lead produced from radioactive decay of heavier elements is not radioactive--it's the stable end-state of that radioactive decay.

 

[k7avenger]

Yep, you can tack on neutrons to any atom. However, once they become unstable, they get exponentially shorter half lives for every neutron added.

 

[Grospoliner]

Snip

We are clearly done here. Since you continue to attempt to misrepresent what I have stated in a frankly desperate attempt to discredit my position, I am opting to no longer continue any attempt at debating you as you clearly would much rather talk about geopolitical topics rather than science. Good bye.

 

[DracoSuave]

Snip

We are clearly done here. Since you continue to attempt to misrepresent what I have stated in a frankly desperate attempt to discredit my position, I am opting to no longer continue any attempt at debating you as you clearly would much rather talk about geopolitical topics rather than science. Good bye.

Too bad the issue isn't solely scientific. That ain't my fault.

Don't hate me, hate the countries that made it that way.

 

[vxicepickxv]

My whole family (as well as myself) have worked in the nuclear business for 30+ years. It's very safe, renewable energy. Don't listen to all the bad stuff you heard about it for the last 40 years. It's MUCH safer. And the reason Chernobyl happened is because they didn't have any containment, and had no clue what they were doing with nuclear power.

You also missed the part about how they didn't build it to safely shut down in case of a meltdown.

Never have your cooling rods fight gravity. If you do, they're going to fail, and it's going to be the most vile kind of awesome you'll ever see.

 

[Officer Crayon]

Ok, this is good, but it's nuclear power, and frankly, after chernobyl, people are a bit cautious of using such materials.

you understand that many places still use nuclear right? hugely in japan, and also in the united states.

 

[RicoADF]

So it's just smaller amounts of nuclear fuel? That's fine, I suppose, but just finding a place to put the plants that keep it save from environmental contamination and natural disasters would limit the availability of it.

That, and since it seems to be more potent than the normal uranium used for nuclear fuel, so disposal would be a major concern. Facilities like Yucca Mountain would suffice for the disposal, but it's almost guaranteed that not every country would have access to or even bother to construct such disposal sites. Environmental contamination would be a major risk, and with everyone still on edge after the Fukushima catastrophe you'd be hard pressed to find many who would support the effort without an enormous amount of regulation.

That does make me wonder, though... Why don't we just sent our waste to the sun yet? Load up a rocket with spent fuel, launch and let inertia coast it to the big ball o' fire..

Adding in unstable elements to the sun could potentially be quite catastrophic. Best to avoid it period and find other sources of fuel unless a way to recycle the waste 100% can be found.

 

[DracoSuave]

Also this idea of 'recycling' nuclear waste is a bit of a misnomer. You're not recycling nuclear waste... you're taking useless uranium and making it into a different nuclear fuel.

'But isn't that recycling nuclear waste?'

Nope. You see, this is something that only happens in Breeder reactors. Why does this not happen in non-breeder reactors?

Because non-breeder reactors don't have uranium-238 to begin with. Nuclear waste is krypton 86 and barium-144.

Barium-144 IS radioactive. Furthermore, Ba-144 decays into two isotopes of Lanthanum. Those then decay into Cesium. Which decays into Praesodymium. Which decays into Neodymium. Finally, something non-radioactive! This entire process takes a long time before the material is 'safe'.


ALl this talk of recycling waste? Fuck off with those lies. Barium 144 can't be recycled.

What you call 'recycling' is actually taking some other product, and using the neutrons released from the nuclear reaction and transforming something else into nuclear fuel. It has nothing to do with nuclear waste.

Snip

We are clearly done here. Since you continue to attempt to misrepresent what I have stated in a frankly desperate attempt to discredit my position, I am opting to no longer continue any attempt at debating you as you clearly would much rather talk about geopolitical topics rather than science. Good bye.

When you start using the science properly, you can actually go 'HEY WE NEED TO ONLY TALK THE SCIENCE.'

Instead... stop using blatant lies like 'recycling' and such. It's stupid.

 

[DracoSuave]

...You see, this is something that only happens in Breeder reactors. Why does this not happen in non-breeder reactors?

Because non-breeder reactors don't have uranium-238 to begin with. Nuclear waste is krypton 86 and barium-144.

You don't put pure slugs of uranium-235 into nuclear reactors. Processing the fuel rods with 100% pure U-235 is too expensive for reactors, with dubious benefit.

The point is... it's not the U-238 that's the problematic nuclear waste, it's the Ba-144.

 

[Mr Jack]

It is incredibly expensive to launch things into space. The recently retired shuttles cost roughly $450,000,000 to launch, and carry a payload of 26,786 kg. There is around 2,721,000kg of high level nuclear waste generated per year in the US. To launch this to orbit, let alone to The Sun, with current technology would cost around $47,000,000,000 per year. This is of course a very rough estimate, with possiby unreliable data, but illustrates the difficulty of doing so.

In the long term, this cost could be reduced by developing better ways to deliver the payload, but that in itself will be incredibly expensive. The money could be better spent researching new fuel sources such Fusion.

A giant slingshot will do the trick, or a big catapult. Those don't require any fuel, are simple to build, and are historically proven to be good at throwing large things a very long way.

Escape Velocity for the Earth is roughly 11Km/s. That is without factoring in air resistance. I doubt a catapult capable of launching an object with a velocity of over 24 606.2992 miles per hour could be constructed.

Snip

Or a space elevator.
Manufacture the waste disposal ships in space, negates the cost of getting the shit into orbit.

I like the idea of Space Elevators, but I think it unlikely that we will be able to construct one any time soon. The materials we have that can survive the kind of tension on the thread cannot be scaled up to anything beyond the micrometer scale. I think at some point we will be able to build one, but not until great advances are made in materials science.

As for building things in space; the expensive part (in terms of energy and money) of this process is getting stuff out of the Earth's Gravity Well. To build ships in orbit you would have to launch all the material into space, along with crew and supplies, and then construct the ships in the unfamiliar environment. This would probably increase the amount of stuff you are lifting significantly.

It also ignores the fact that you still have to lift the nuclear waste from the surface to your ships in orbit with some kind of rocket (or Space Elevator if we are talking distant future) then transfer it to the waste disposal ships.

wait if everyone had solar power our energy crisis would be over I mean really think about it nothings more renewable than light also less powerplants= more housing space more housing space =more room for population more room for population = win

Solar cannot really be used as a primary energy source because it operates at the whim of uncontrollable forces. There is no efficient way to store large amounts of electrical power for practical timescales. If you are generating energy at noon, there is no way to store that energy for use at six o'clock when people do their cooking.

 

[demoman_chaos]

Escape Velocity for the Earth is roughly 11Km/s. That is without factoring in air resistance. I doubt a catapult capable of launching an object with a velocity of over 24 606.2992 miles per hour could be constructed.

We are able to get very large pieces of metal to go multiples times the speed of sound, we can build a big enough slingshot if we wanted to.

 

[Mr Jack]

Snip

We are able to get very large pieces of metal to go multiples times the speed of sound, we can build a big enough slingshot if we wanted to.

I think that we will be able to do so at some point, but like the space elevator, it is well beyond our capability at the moment.

I assume you are talking about railguns, a technology still in its infancy. So far, the best the US can manage is a railgun that fires a 2Kg slug with a muzzle velocity of 3000m/s. Furthermore, it destroys the railgun each time it fires. This is the current state of technology. To launch stuff to space, it needs to get a lot better.

Proposals like yours have been made before: http://research.lifeboat.com/ieee.em.pdf

It cites a cost of $528/Kg, so once this system was in place, to dispose of the waste the US is currently producing would be $1,437,000,000 per year. This estimate seems useless to me, as it requires advances in technology that we are not sure are possible. It's like speculating on the cost of teleporting it to space: we don't know enough to say.

Its a good idea, but in practice, it does not look workable to me. It relies on too many things falling into place very quickly in the near future. We could build a catapult to launch something into space, and it would work. Once. Then you would have to build it again. I cannot see that being economically feasible.

 

[rabidmidget]

Thorium is more efficient, plentiful and safer.

Just saying.