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Asante
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The Nuclear Fusion Feasibility Poll
#7785794 - 12/21/07 02:31 PM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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Let's get the Nuclear Fusion Feasibility Poll up and running!
Oil isn't going to cut it, and thorium and uranium will only get us so far. If we really are going to do it, establish life among the planets and then spread out among the stars, we're going to need a new workhorse to fuel our energy needs.
Personally I believe fusion power will be that workhorse.
At the moment we're experimenting with first-generation fusion, to try get it going at all. The fusion reaction we're going for is the dirtiest of all: fusing Deuterium with Tritium. It's so dirty because highly radioactive tritium is involved as a fuel and reaction product, and worse still, it puts out neutrons like you wouldn't believe. D+T is the T Ford of fusion fuel reactions: it will get you where you want to be, but start it in the garage and you'll choke on the fumes in minutes. It suffers the additional drawback that it requires Lithium, a finite resource, to be bombarded with neutrons, which basically means you have to have some fission going on the side.
Next stop, second-generation fusion, would be reactions like pure deuterium fusion (D+D) and heavy hydrogen-light helium fusion (D+3He) Deuterium is a major leap forward. This energy source is present on Earth in staggering amounts: There's a couple of miligrams of Deuterium in every bucket of water, that can deliver as much energy as a 55 gallon barrel of oil. So, once we get there, there's more fuel potential on earth than twenty times the volume of all the oceans in oil. In addition to that, once we reach this stage the sky is the limit. The surface of the moon holds relatively high concentrations of light helium fuel (0.01 parts per million by weight) which can be teamed up with Deuterium to give an extremely rich fuel. 0.01ppm sounds minute, but it basically means any spot on the moon has a higher energy density contained in it than a very rich oil deposit.
On top of that, it gives our then space-traveling species an unlimited source of energy, because deuterium and light helium are very abundant in any gas giant planet (like Jupiter, Uranus, Saturn and Neptune just around the corner) and gas giants happen to be a common kind of planet. If we double the distance we travel among the stars, the amount of Deuterium and light Helium available to us will increase eightfold. And even whats present in our own solar system isn't exhaustible for many tens of thousands of years already.
The drawback to second-generation fusion reactions is that although the fuels required are nonradioactive, some reaction products are and there still is a sizable neutron output.
Third generation fusion reactions would be the era, if that day will come, of aneutronic fusion. To mind come reactions like Hydrogen-Boron (H+B), Lithium-Deuterium (Li+D) and especially fusion of pure light Helium (3He+3He). It is a harder reaction to get going, but it produces NO radioactive waste products and NO neutrons. Totally clean energy. You load it with nontoxic fuel and you burn it to nontoxic waste. And the light Helium is present like said on the moon, but also in unlimited abundance in gas giant planets that are all over any galaxy. Totally clean energy, in unlimited supply and strong stuff too. Thirty pounds of the stuff is all an energy plant needs to put out 1.000 megawatts of power.. during an entire year! You could fill balloons with the stuff and give then to your kids or inhale it for a particularly high-pitched voice - It's that safe!
Like I said, a nice dream to be dreaming.
But now a reality check. It is damn hard to get First Generation Fusion (D+T) going. At all. It's several times harder to get Second Generation Fusion going (though we did it already in the very first Hydrogen bomb - Ivy Mike) And it will be about a dozen times as hard to get a Third Generation Fusion reaction going, though that we did too in a part of the reaction scheme of later Hydrogen bombs, like Castle Bravo
Lets assume we humans get our act together in the coming 50 years, and that there will be centuries of world peace and prosperity and all that stuff, one giant worldwide Christmas of good intentions and thought out actions. And, of course, scientific progress.
Given this scenario of unbridled scientific progress, which Fusion Energy level will be possible by the year 2500 AD? No political doom thinking here, just focus on what you think will be scientifically feasible, provided we have the fuels of course to do it.
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Asante
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Re: The Nuclear Fusion Feasibility Poll [Re: Asante]
#7785802 - 12/21/07 02:34 PM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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I'm a believer 
Right before I was born the Apollo crew went to the moon with an onboard computer that had 32 kB of RAM. Today my personal computer has 1.024.000 kB and it's almost three years old! We're gonna make it, oh yea
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wortiesbo



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Re: The Nuclear Fusion Feasibility Poll [Re: Asante]
#7785825 - 12/21/07 02:40 PM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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i think its very possible that we will master nuclear fusion by the year 2500. just look at how far the human race has come in 100 years.
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lIllIIIllIlIIlIlIIllIllIIl
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Re: The Nuclear Fusion Feasibility Poll [Re: Asante]
#7786469 - 12/21/07 05:45 PM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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lets look at the sun, a good example of a fusion reaction in progress
while it seems impressive (and it is responsible for almost all the energy available on our planet) the sun is a huge object. in fact, the sun doesn't produce that much energy relative to its total size
in other words the only sustainable, energy positive fusion reaction that we know of doesn't radiate much energy at all
i think i read that a simple candle flame radiates many times more energy for it's size than the sun
so i am pretty skeptical that fusion power will ever produce the amount of energy we need
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lIllIIIllIlIIlIlIIllIllIIl
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Re: The Nuclear Fusion Feasibility Poll [Re: Asante]
#7786499 - 12/21/07 05:52 PM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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another thing to consider is how lifeless our universe appears to be
you would think that with the universe being 13 billion years old or whatever, we would be seeing von-neuman probes and alien radio transmissions all over the place... but we don't
i get the feeling that the energies involved in interstellar space travel aren't available and we are more or less trapped here on this planet
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Diploid
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Re: The Nuclear Fusion Feasibility Poll [Re: Asante]
#7786801 - 12/21/07 07:26 PM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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Why would anyone fuse anything above iron? You can't get energy that way.
-------------------- Republican Values: 1) You can't get married to your spouse who is the same sex as you. 2) You can't have an abortion no matter how much you don't want a child. 3) You can't have a certain plant in your possession or you'll get locked up with a rapist and a murderer. 4) We need a smaller, less-intrusive government.
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DieCommie


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Re: The Nuclear Fusion Feasibility Poll [Re: Diploid]
#7786814 - 12/21/07 07:29 PM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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To make gold. Some people love gold
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maggotz


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what if they're thousands of light years away? how could we communicate with them? (it's completely irrelevant. just a thought that came up. )
Edited by maggotz (12/21/07 09:07 PM)
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Diploid
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Re: The Nuclear Fusion Feasibility Poll [Re: DieCommie]
#7787246 - 12/21/07 09:29 PM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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To make gold.
Hmmm... can you make beer this way??
-------------------- Republican Values: 1) You can't get married to your spouse who is the same sex as you. 2) You can't have an abortion no matter how much you don't want a child. 3) You can't have a certain plant in your possession or you'll get locked up with a rapist and a murderer. 4) We need a smaller, less-intrusive government.
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DieCommie


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Re: The Nuclear Fusion Feasibility Poll [Re: maggotz]
#7787265 - 12/21/07 09:35 PM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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Quote:
maggotz said: what if they're thousands of light years away? how could we communicate with them? (it's completely irrelevant. just a thought that came up. )
Very patiently.
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Annom
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Quote:
in fact, the sun doesn't produce that much energy relative to its total size
in other words the only sustainable, energy positive fusion reaction that we know of doesn't radiate much energy at all
i think i read that a simple candle flame radiates many times more energy for it's size than the sun
Total radiant power of the sun is 3.85*10^26 W. The radiant exitance of the sun is 63*10^6 W/m^2. And it has an impressive surface area.
We would need a, scaled down, sun with a radius of 22 km to provide all humans on earth with 2000 W. (not sure my quick calculations are correct ). That's a big object. We should do better.
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maggotz


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Re: The Nuclear Fusion Feasibility Poll [Re: DieCommie]
#7787325 - 12/21/07 09:53 PM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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true.
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lIllIIIllIlIIlIlIIllIllIIl
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Re: The Nuclear Fusion Feasibility Poll [Re: Annom]
#7787353 - 12/21/07 09:59 PM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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Quote:
About 3.4×1038 protons (hydrogen nuclei) are converted into helium nuclei every second (out of ~8.9×1056 total amount of free protons in the Sun), releasing energy at the matter–energy conversion rate of 4.26 million tonnes per second, 383 yottawatts (3.83×1026 W) or 9.15×1010 megatons of TNT per second. This actually corresponds to a surprisingly low rate of energy production in the Sun's core—about 0.3 µW/cm³ (microwatts per cubic cm), or about 6 µW/kg of matter. For comparison, the human body produces heat at approximately the rate 1.2 W/kg, millions of times greater per unit mass.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun
maybe the matrix wasn't so far off?
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Annom
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Interesting, I was also impressed by how large our little sun has to be. But can't we do better than that? Beat the sun?
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lIllIIIllIlIIlIlIIllIllIIl
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Re: The Nuclear Fusion Feasibility Poll [Re: Annom]
#7787585 - 12/21/07 11:24 PM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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i don't think we have a chance to do better than the sun until there is an energy crisis and a real motivation to develop fusion technology
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Legend9123



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Quote:
adjust said: i don't think we have a chance to do better than the sun until there is an energy crisis and a real motivation to develop fusion technology
Our current fusion techniques already are far more efficient than those found in the core of the Sun because the temperatures are much higher and the plasma density greater. By the logic used above, because the Sun produces far less energy relative to mass than a human so should a fusion bomb. That, however, is not the case. On a separate note, fossil fuels are not going to sustain the continued expansion and power-thirst of mankind for much longer.
All information in my post is from a person with limited knowledge of nuclear fusion and I could be completely wrong. But from my reading that seems to be correct.
By the way, check out this: http://www.iter.org/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITERand http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMO
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Edited by Legend9123 (12/22/07 12:26 AM)
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lIllIIIllIlIIlIlIIllIllIIl
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Re: The Nuclear Fusion Feasibility Poll [Re: Legend9123]
#7787788 - 12/22/07 12:52 AM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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if its more efficient than the sun, why aren't we using it?
you're right about fusion bombs though
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Legend9123



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I think more of the issue is coming from finding an economical way to confine the energy and neutron radiation than not being an efficient source of energy.
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Asante
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Re: The Nuclear Fusion Feasibility Poll [Re: Diploid]
#7788259 - 12/22/07 08:37 AM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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Quote:
Why would anyone fuse anything above iron?
If it sounds completely outlandish, assume you misunderstand  With fusing elements above iron I ofcourse meant the top side of lighter elements, not the lower side of heavier elements. This reading the Periodic Table in rows downward, starting with Hydrogen.
Quote:
you would think that with the universe being 13 billion years old or whatever, we would be seeing von-neuman probes and alien radio transmissions all over the place... but we don't
First of all, would our radio telescopes be up to picking up the radio signals sent by an alien John Glenn from their moon to their home planet in the Andromeda galaxy, our galactic neighbor? I think not. Those Watts will be completely drowned out by the noise in the universe, the throbbing pulsars, stars sharing atmosphere while in close orbit and other noisemakers. Also, wouldn't it make far better sense when you are travelling to nearby stars to send a directional transmission to your destination instead of dissapating the precious energy of your craft uniformly in all directions? On a space craft, energy is precious.
As to probes, hey, we're only paying attention for like a hundred years, and that's barely. How much debris is in orbit around the earth? Is it all accounted for? What if there's something listening in from the edge of our solar system, sending directional signals to God knows where? If you are a decent alien race you stay well clear of inhabited planets as to not intervene in their development. Probes would be looking for uninhabited worlds to colonize. One look at our planet with a sensitive camera reveals chlorophyll green. Listen in on any radio band and you hear the murmur of a whole world.
Perhaps Woody Woodpecker and Bugs Bunny are the latest craze on Rigel or scientists and anthropologists are fiercely debating whether Laurel & Hardy are prophets or politicians. Who knows? Perhaps the Tunguska event was a probe leaving the planet and engaging the warp drive in the lower atmosphere.
We don't really know if there are or have been probes. We don't really know if we could pick up the signals aliens would be using for communication. Perhaps next year some revolutionary transmission method is discovered, making the world radio-silent before 2010. Perhaps emitting evenly disappated radio signals is a phase of mere decades that a civilization goes through.
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Edited by Asante (12/22/07 09:08 AM)
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Asante
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Quote:
lets look at the sun, a good example of a fusion reaction in progress
while it seems impressive (and it is responsible for almost all the energy available on our planet) the sun is a huge object. in fact, the sun doesn't produce that much energy relative to its total size
Look at the Tsar Bomba hydrogen bomb. 8x2 meters, weighing 27 tons, containing 2 tons of Lithium deuteride (LiD) fusion fuel, managed to shoot several hundred kilos of it resulting in the annihilation of 5 pounds of matter and thus kicking almost 200 petajoules of energy into the world, equivalent to 50 million tons of TNT, and for a split second it shone as bright as a small star. That was 1961 technology, or actually 1950s technology because according to the designer it was a rather pedestrian design with no real innovation, other than just being huge.
And mind you, once we have the technology for controlled burning of thermonuclear fuel, it's not like the stuff is rare or expensive or anything.
You can google for sources, and then buy a pound of Lithium hydride for about 50 bucks. Its not radioactive, it's just flammable. The stuff you buy will be 6Li depleted so consists solely of 7Li-H which is exactly what you'd want. If you flash heat the stuff to just 100 KeV (1.5x what you'd need for D-T) you end up with two Helium 4 atoms, without ANY neutron load to your equipment, and a shitload of energy, 17.2 MeV of it. If it goes off with a bang it'd be as destructive as the bomb that dropped on Hiroshima but if you burn it for fuel, your fifty bucks worth of Lithium hydride will give off as much energy as 6.500 barrels of oil. And no neutrons mind you, just heat and helium.
Even a lame particle accellerator throws nuclei at many TeV, costly ofcourse but we can. I think some scientist somewhere is going to have an eureka moment and put us years ahead of existing technology.
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Cepheus
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Re: The Nuclear Fusion Feasibility Poll [Re: Asante]
#7793361 - 12/23/07 05:58 PM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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The energy release from the fission of U-235 is pitiful compared to that of the fusion of Duterium.
I hope that we can successfully produce (more importantly I guess would be containing this reaction) within the next 10-20 years, else we really are going to be in the shit 
Even with all these advancements in nuclear reactor technology (like liquid metal cooling & fast breeder reactors) fission isn't really feasible in the long term.

The energy that is produced in a fusion reaction is phenomenal. This is partly why I can only hope that we produce a successful, stable fusion reactor in the next 20 years, because there are many factors which hinder this (like the plasma requirement and the cost of containment).
I do believe we'll crack it.. maybe in the next 50 years. I certainly hope we do it soon though
-------------------- "I only ever hope to reach equilibrium, in Nature's matrix, in line with the meridian" ~ Jehst
"...and I know that I have to keep breathing, as tomorrow the sun will rise, who knows what the tide will bring?" Free Spore Ring Europe Send any spare spore prints you might have and help the distribution
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Asante
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Re: The Nuclear Fusion Feasibility Poll [Re: Cepheus]
#7793443 - 12/23/07 06:30 PM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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I consider fission useful mainly for three things:
1..as a primary energy crutch to get by - to give zero CO2, low-pollution energy while we figure out fusion. In the nearby future, right now, we need something relatively clean with a massive energy output, and right now only fission can fill that void. This will take long. 2..as a lightweight high output fuel for space travel and the moon and mars colonies, again until we figure out fusion, in this case until we can fuse in a relatively small reactor. This will take longer. 3..as a nuclear explosive, to trigger fusion bombs in defense of earth (and colonies) against asteroid impacts, here too until we find a way to trigger a massive fusion cascade without it, in a portable package. This will take the longest.
Even if we can burn DT we aren't out of the woods yet. We're only out of the woods once we can burn pure Deuterium, since this fuel is naturally abundant and non-radioactive, as opposed to Tritium which to day has to be made in fission reactors. Once we can burn pure Deuterium, it will supply us with Tritium without fission, which we can burn in lower-tech DT plants, and it will supply us with Helium-3 without having to go to the moon to get it.
Once we can burn DD we can take Uranium out of the loop and we won't be dependent on Lithium-6 either. This is a great help in preventing atomic bomb technology proliferation, as every country in the world can produce Deuterium fuel, which occurs in all water. You simply place an order with Shell Fusion they build a couple of fusion plants and a deuterium production plant and your country's an energy producer, independent of oil and international politics.
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lIllIIIllIlIIlIlIIllIllIIl
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Re: The Nuclear Fusion Feasibility Poll [Re: Cepheus]
#7794479 - 12/24/07 12:47 AM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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Quote:
Cepheus said: Even with all these advancements in nuclear reactor technology (like liquid metal cooling & fast breeder reactors) fission isn't really feasible in the long term.
what about thorium fission reactors? india is spending a lot of money creating the technology and thorium is much more abundant than uranium
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Seuss
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Re: The Nuclear Fusion Feasibility Poll [Re: Asante]
#7794718 - 12/24/07 03:16 AM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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> I consider fission useful mainly for three things:
You forgot the most important...
4) Creation of medical isotopes
> what about thorium fission reactors?
Still have the problem of short reactor lifetimes (aprox 30 years) and radioactive waste that will be around long after humans have died out. Fission, for energy production, is a pollution nightmare.
I'm convinced we could be running on fusion power now, but those that control the world won't let it happen. Fusion is free energy, almost literally. Those that have global empires created on the sale of energy don't want to see it become free. In their mind, it is much better to string people out on dirty fission, building multi-billion dollar reactors for the next hundred years or so. (The same people are behind the "global warming" scare.... raises fossil fuel based energy prices and gets everybody on board for fission based power production.)
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Cepheus
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Quote:
adjust said:
Quote:
Cepheus said: Even with all these advancements in nuclear reactor technology (like liquid metal cooling & fast breeder reactors) fission isn't really feasible in the long term.
what about thorium fission reactors? india is spending a lot of money creating the technology and thorium is much more abundant than uranium
Thats what a breeder reactor is; one that uses thorium and breeds fuel (i.e produces U235 or P239) at a rate faster than it consumes it.
-------------------- "I only ever hope to reach equilibrium, in Nature's matrix, in line with the meridian" ~ Jehst
"...and I know that I have to keep breathing, as tomorrow the sun will rise, who knows what the tide will bring?" Free Spore Ring Europe Send any spare spore prints you might have and help the distribution
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Seuss
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Re: The Nuclear Fusion Feasibility Poll [Re: Cepheus]
#7794825 - 12/24/07 06:31 AM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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> Thats what a breeder reactor is; one that uses thorium and breeds fuel
The true definition of a breeder reactor is a reactor that consumes both fissionable and fertile fuel and produces fissionable fuel (plus energy). Thorium is irrelevant to the definition, beyond being a fertile fuel.
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Cepheus
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Re: The Nuclear Fusion Feasibility Poll [Re: Seuss]
#7794839 - 12/24/07 06:54 AM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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Well yeah, if we're going into the semantics. Most breeder reactors use thorium as a fuel though.
-------------------- "I only ever hope to reach equilibrium, in Nature's matrix, in line with the meridian" ~ Jehst
"...and I know that I have to keep breathing, as tomorrow the sun will rise, who knows what the tide will bring?" Free Spore Ring Europe Send any spare spore prints you might have and help the distribution
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Seuss
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Re: The Nuclear Fusion Feasibility Poll [Re: Cepheus]
#7794865 - 12/24/07 07:34 AM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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> Most breeder reactors use thorium as a fuel though.
Most? Really? I'm not aware of a single thorium based breeder reactor that is in production use rather than experimental use... but I have been out of the field for a decade, so things may have changed.
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Cepheus
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Re: The Nuclear Fusion Feasibility Poll [Re: Seuss]
#7794880 - 12/24/07 07:53 AM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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Thermal breeding reactors can use Thorium exclusively which decays and produces fissible U233.
Pressurized light water breeder reactors like the one at Shippingport (well, before it was decommissioned) ran on thorium 
I thought they were more widespread than this but apparently they are not.. Technology of the future I guess
-------------------- "I only ever hope to reach equilibrium, in Nature's matrix, in line with the meridian" ~ Jehst
"...and I know that I have to keep breathing, as tomorrow the sun will rise, who knows what the tide will bring?" Free Spore Ring Europe Send any spare spore prints you might have and help the distribution
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lIllIIIllIlIIlIlIIllIllIIl
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Re: The Nuclear Fusion Feasibility Poll [Re: Cepheus]
#7795269 - 12/24/07 11:03 AM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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my understanding of a breeder reactor is a reactor that "breeds" fuel
in other words it used a fissile material to produce energy plus more fissile material such as plutonium or uranium
one of the main drawbacks of thorium fission is that its easy to make bombs or something from its progeny... its more of a security issue (uranium is very easy to control since it is mined in so few places) because thorium is much more common than uranium
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