The Atomic Age
20 Sep 2012, 11:50 pm
i dont think anyone is disputing that fisison is cheaper, but it isnt excactly renewable either, the supplies will last far shorter than the available deuterium,
tritium would ideally be bred in fission reactors as a side process to normal operation, that tritium is then fused with deuterium to produce helium that is then turned into energy.
we would need fission reactors anyway, fusion is a decade out in any practical sense at least, from there it will take another decade or two before it becomes truly viable.
also if h-h fusion becomes possible then mining huge quantities of it would become quite cheap, we have the moon adn as long as you find a way to construct drop pods on the moon then the energy required to dump it on earth is relatively insignificant.
sometimes the issue isnt how chepa but how densely you can pack that energy, in that sense fusion, especially he-he fusion has a clear advantage, there is also no neutron radiation from he-he reactions and that will mean that there will be no ionization of the metals used to construct the reactor, so cleanup would be easy and almost tot he point where the mythical nuclear car could become a reality(if it will ever be possible to shrink the tec enough)
thing is i dont think one can simply denounce fusion, it holds a great potential, we should simply stop relying on it as a solution to our current problems and concentrate on using it to prepare for the enxt challenge.
First of all, fission actually CAN be renewable! Ever heard of Breeder Reactors? As it turns out, there is more thorium on Earth than Uranium and thorium can be produced in reactors(along with plutonium and a host of other fissile isotopes). The process of mining Uranium and isotope separation is a HELL of a lot cheaper is terms of money and energy input than heavy water production and particularly the electrolysis of heavy water to produce deuterium. Fusion is cleaner, but will always be more expensive and less efficient.
Oodain
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21 Sep 2012, 12:41 am
yes but you will still need fertile material to do so and that is still limited, it is not as if the atoms springs out of thin air.
again if you use a fusion breeder reactor where the fuel goes through several cycles then in essence you would have at least as efficient a system.
any claim as to how long we have fuel for for such a system is well above ad beyond anything remotely achievable by fission on earth alone.
but again my argument is not that it is a viable short term energy source, but that it will be able to provide and sustain a higher energy output overall, fusion simply yields vastly more energy compaed to mass expended, the loss of that energy after its produced is an engineering qestion, in some designs it is as previously stated a non issue, in others the reason they dont work, if the previosuly quoted article employed pure he-he fusion in their next stage of research then the energy would be transferred to the EM field with almost no loss or delay and since it is pulsed in the time frame of a 100 nanoseconds with limited fuel then any heat loss or loss of containment is extremely minimal.
theoretically it should scale very well, if they reach breakeven by next year we might even know within the next 5, if it works one needs to be able to repeat the process quickly enough to actually be feasible for continous production.
if i had the choice of what to do i would still use liquid thorium reactors, due to the safety and ease of construction, no high pressure vessel to blow out either.
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//through chaos comes complexity//
the scent of the tamarillo is pungent and powerfull,
woe be to the nose who nears it.
21 Sep 2012, 5:43 am
One of the most efficient types of fission reactors for generating electricity is the Nuclear Lightbulb reactor which uses gaseous nuclear fuel rather than solid or liquid fuel.
21 Sep 2012, 6:03 am
spot on.
Gascore reactors produce a lot more heat than solid core or molten salt reactors. The higher the temperature, the more Gibbs free energy is released, and the greater the efficiency. So in short, gascore reactors could produce the most amount of electricity.
Even if and when fusion reactors can produce more energy than they consume, the enormous cost of fusion fuel production will make thermonuclear fusion as a means of generating electricity prohibitively expensive and economically unsustainable.
