Nuclear Fusion Energy Research (video)

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Winston

Winston

Lorenzo von Matterhorn
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[video=youtube;knrHPneSN10]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knrHPneSN10[/video]
 
markkoelsch said:
And has been for 30 or 40 years.
Click to expand...
I made exactly that comment prior to the video link and deleted it. That 30 to 40 years in the future figure was stated in the video and I've heard that forever.

Meanwhile, an absolute pittance is being spent in this country on R&D for 4th generation fission reactors which "burn" 97% of their nuclear fuel thereby leaving vastly less waste behind and requiring vastly less nuclear fuel, reactors which could burn up the waste already left behind by our dangerous ANTIQUE 2nd gen reactors which burn less than 1% of their fuel thereby leaving vast amounts of highly radioactive waste behind.

But, never fear, the CHINESE are spending billions on that...
 
Winston said:
I made exactly that comment prior to the video link and deleted it. That 30 to 40 years in the future figure was stated in the video and I've heard that forever.

Meanwhile, an absolute pittance is being spent in this country on R&D for 4th generation fission reactors which "burn" 97% of their nuclear fuel thereby leaving vastly less waste behind and requiring vastly less nuclear fuel, reactors which could burn up the waste already left behind by our dangerous ANTIQUE 2nd gen reactors which burn less than 1% of their fuel thereby leaving vast amounts of highly radioactive waste behind.

But, never fear, the CHINESE are spending billions on that...
Click to expand...

Amen and Amen.

The environmentalists found out years ago that they could tie up in knots the commercial light water reactors in this country. The national register gives the time and place for public hearings for each licensing phase of each commercial nuclear power plant (construction permit, start-up, operating, etc.) In principle a nuclear plant could be built in 6 years, but after all the licensing problems it takes double that. The utilities cannot afford the carrying cost of such large capital investments, so they gave up. New nuclear power plants in the this country is a disaster. Meanwhile, the Chinese are now the world leaders in building nuclear power plants.
 
I've never quite understood the apparent disconnects in the environmentalist line of thinking. Hydrocarbons are bad. But replacing coal power plants with nuclear plants is bad. So we should close the coal plants with no generating capacity to replace them with. Nuclear waste is bad. So we shouldn't allow the development of next generation nuclear plants that produce far less waste and, by the way, we can't allow the certification of the one safe place we spent billion$$ to store nuclear waste. And so all of our waste continues to lay around in temporary storage facilities that weren't designed to hold it long-term and, which are now storing more than they were designed to store, even temporarily.
 
Peartree said:
I've never quite understood the apparent disconnects in the environmentalist line of thinking. Hydrocarbons are bad. But replacing coal power plants with nuclear plants is bad. So we should close the coal plants with no generating capacity to replace them with. Nuclear waste is bad. So we shouldn't allow the development of next generation nuclear plants that produce far less waste and, by the way, we can't allow the certification of the one safe place we spent billion$$ to store nuclear waste. And so all of our waste continues to lay around in temporary storage facilities that weren't designed to hold it long-term and, which are now storing more than they were designed to store, even temporarily.
Click to expand...

The federal government actually have started a long term facility for disposing/storing nuclear waste, but the local politicians killed it after the federal government already spent billions on it. A lot of people are terrified of anything nuclear.

I think we should do what the French did years ago and have the government (with contractor's input) chose a standard design for a nuclear reactor and that is the design everyone uses.
 
The American public's concern with anything nuclear has helped the environmentalists immensely. The French and the Japanese actually have reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel in order to extract the U-235 available in the spent fuel further extending their resources.

It is interesting in the last chapter of the new book "Climate of Hope" that Hope and Bloomberg devote one paragraph to urging the increased use of commercial nuclear power. This is after 40 years of the environmentalists doing everything they could to tying up commercial nuclear power in the U.S. in knots. BTW similar tactics have substantially caused the utilities to convert coal generated electric energy to natural gas generated electric energy.

The U.S. needs large amounts of electrical energy to maintain our standard of living and being competitive in the world no matter what. Controlled fusion by the D-T reaction has basic problems once the break-even point has been achieved on a dependable basis. Like what to do with high energy neutrons. Some researches have advocated going to nuclear reactions with Boron.
 
What about that idea of using many smaller reactors deep underground? I can't remember the young lad who thought of it but I believe the biggest plus was that it would greatly reduce the chance of meltdown as well as limit the damage in case there was one.

Until we finally figure out fusion, we need to leverage fission in an increasingly safer and more efficient way.
 
Cabernut said:
What about that idea of using many smaller reactors deep underground? I can't remember the young lad who thought of it but I believe the biggest plus was that it would greatly reduce the chance of meltdown as well as limit the damage in case there was one.

Until we finally figure out fusion, we need to leverage fission in an increasingly safer and more efficient way.
Click to expand...

Yes, I saw that proposal, too. It was on that forum where people are chosen to present their new idea. It sounded interesting. Again, the public would be a stumbling block. Whose community would be the first to try out such a new idea.
 
Put 'em out to sea next to the edge of the continental shelf. Build 'em on rails on land, then coast 'em down the rail out to the edge. Bad thing happens, blow the hold downs and let 'em drop.
 
Winston said:
I made exactly that comment prior to the video link and deleted it. That 30 to 40 years in the future figure was stated in the video and I've heard that forever.

Meanwhile, an absolute pittance is being spent in this country on R&D for 4th generation fission reactors which "burn" 97% of their nuclear fuel thereby leaving vastly less waste behind and requiring vastly less nuclear fuel, reactors which could burn up the waste already left behind by our dangerous ANTIQUE 2nd gen reactors which burn less than 1% of their fuel thereby leaving vast amounts of highly radioactive waste behind.

But, never fear, the CHINESE are spending billions on that...
Click to expand...

The US is very short sighted in terms of energy. The Feds have not allowed a new refinery to be built in decades. They freak over pipelines. They hate nuclear energy. They hate coal. Basically they do not like much of anything. Then they do not invest in things like fusion, which if they can be made to work really could be game changers.


Sent from my iPhone using Rocketry Forum
 
AMAZINGLY, the rather leftish, environmentalist PBS produced THIS which points out that the current reactors we're using are antiquated crapolla and that safe and cheap nuclear (fission) power IS easily possible:

[video=youtube;eDCEjWNGv6Y]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDCEjWNGv6Y[/video]
 
Winston said:
AMAZINGLY, the rather leftish, environmentalist PBS produced THIS which points out that the current reactors we're using are antiquated crapolla and that safe and cheap nuclear (fission) power IS easily possible:

[video=youtube;eDCEjWNGv6Y]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDCEjWNGv6Y[/video]
Click to expand...

Winston,
This is a very good presentation. Agreed that PBS has a certain slant, but Miles O'Brien really does his best work when it is on a technical subject. I learned a lot.
 
A really fantastic documentary on this topic is called "Pandora's Promise", available on Netflix for sure. Really altered my perspective on nuclear power and the ability of renewables to fill in the fossil fuel gap.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
A pretty sight. I learned that the bubbles are formed not by boiling, but by neutron dissociation of water into H2 and O2.

Pennsylvania State University Research Reactor Start Up & Shut Down (2017)

[video=youtube;gCNBJALmXqw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCNBJALmXqw[/video]
 
That's beautiful and terrifying at the same time. Next time I see something glowing blue in a movie, I'm going to shout "Get away from the Neutrons!"
 
Ah, fond memories....

I've have the opportunity to crawl around on the top of the MaRIE machine at Los Alamos and be in the instrumentation room when it fired (and shook the whole campus)
The lighting on top of the swimming pool is purely due to the parasitics -- pretty cool!

I've also had the opportunity to control the Penn State Breazeal reactor running a couple of experiments and getting to directly view the Cherenkov glow.
Fun stuff!

Both items featured here evoking great remembrances......
Love BIG PHYSICS!
 
Standing next to the pool of a Triga Mk 2 reactor is pulsed is also quite impressive.
Here's a link to a video of a 1.4GW pulse lasting 4 mS generated in a reactor core only 24" across, which is then surrounded by a graphite reflector.
[video=youtube;KRlTTJquY7U]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRlTTJquY7U[/video]
This is done by pneumatically removing a C ring control rod and inserting a reactor fuel follower, resulting in a $3 (yes dollar) step insertion.
One dollar is the amount of reactivity needed to make the reactor core go prompt critical
The Cherenkov radiation radiation is caused by fission product decay occurring after the control rods have dropped back into the core.
Which I could have made videos like this when I was still pulling rods.
 

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