Science!! Fucking magnets, how do they work?

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Araysar

Loser Araysar

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Eomer_sl said:
Isn't one of the major limitations of nuclear the fact that plants must be located near a large body of water for cooling purposes? Which pretty much requires them to be located in areas extremely prone to a multitude of natural disasters?
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More nuke plants in Illinois than in 48 or 49 other US states. Only 1 of them is on lake Michigan (Zion plant) and that one was shut down in late 90s
 
Xequecal

Xequecal

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Cad_sl said:
Heavy water can actually be produced by electrolysis and distillation but uses a large amount of power. One can only suspect that this amount of power is significantly less than that produced by fusion. Any chemists/engineers know about this?
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Deuterium can be extracted from plain old water. Tritium has to be bred from lithium-6, which means D-T fusion doesn't really have many more resources in abundance than fission power does.

Fusion power honestly doesn't solve our big energy problems. We have enough reserves for thousands of years worth of fission power. While fusion power would solve some of the issues with fission power like having less waste to deal with, the biggest problem with nuclear energy is that too many people are just irrationally terrified of anything to do with radiation, and that unfortunately applies to fusion power as well.
 
Big Phoenix

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He3 fusion bras.

From what Ive read D-T, D-D fusion seems kinda worthless seeing as how its still radioactive and generates power via steam turning turbines just like a fission reactor. Seems more like a stepping stone than an actual power source.
 
Deathwing

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Cad_sl said:
Uhh, the point of the new reactor design is that the fusion isn't a net energy loss.
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The article linked doesn't actually say it and the one it links implies that maintaining the fusion process is what makes current reactors a net energy loss. So, I guess you can infer if you improve the plasma containment, then it makes it net positive? IDK, I've read them both a couple times and I can't make my mind up if the new reactor design is an improvement net energy generation, or it's an improvement in energy/size. Or both. Seems to me that making fusion net energy positive would be a much bigger deal than energy/size. Maybe I missed the part in the article that said that.
 
Palum

Palum

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I'm a little less skeptical of Skunk Works than random dudes on the internet. Not enough to get excited yet, of course.
 
Lithose

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Cad_sl said:
Obviously if it takes 1g of fusion fuel to gather .9g of fusion fuel, thats literally the definition of unsustainable. That was my question, how much energy does it take to make one unit of heavy water, and how much energy do the ITER/Lockheeed reactors project to make from a unit of fuel?
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Well, as others have said, electrical generation is not our problem. With just the uninhabited deserts in the U.S.; we could make enough solar power to supply all of North America (Using just mirror plants, so no photo electrics IE rare earths). The problem is getting that energy to the end user, thanks to transmission loss. A small, even if it's the size of a home, reactor--that has no chance of melt down, and produces no carbon--would allow us to build huge solar fields in east bumble fuck, and then transport the fuel energy to the location we actually need active electrical fields. It's a huge windfall to be able to extract a higher degree of energy from a small space; regardless of how much it takes to make it. (And it could be an enormous loss; the figures on how much power the sun pushes onto the earth are just staggering; if we had a fuel that could transport that energy from production? Energy problems would go away.)

Edit: Wanted to get the factoid before I posted it.

But just to go over; apaperin 2001 illustrated that even at 10% generation rate (Today's are significantly more efficient PE's can go up to 40% now); you'd only need about the area of South Dakota to produce all the earth's power needs. I'm not sure if CSP plants (Mirror based) have had the same increase in efficiency; but even at 10%, we'd generate so much that making the fuel would be trivial. The bottle neck right now really is just on site generation, not total generation. Also, other forms of power generation would be immensely more effecient, like the dams in the Southern U.S.--rather than losing all that energy pumping the electricity around, they could just make fuel and transport it to local generators.

The other huge benefit of this would also be more localized and less fragile energy infrastructures. Which is something wedesperatelyneed.
 
Cad

Cad

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Lithose_sl said:
Well, as others have said, electrical generation is not our problem. With just the uninhabited deserts in the U.S.; we could make enough solar power to supply all of North America (Using just mirror plants, so no photo electrics IE rare earths). The problem is getting that energy to the end user, thanks to transmission loss. A small, even if it's the size of a home, reactor--that has no chance of melt down, and produces no carbon--would allow us to build huge solar fields in east bumble fuck, and then transport the fuel energy to the location we actually need active electrical fields. It's a huge windfall to be able to extract a higher degree of energy from a small space; regardless of how much it takes to make it. (And it could be an enormous loss; the figures on how much power the sun pushes onto the earth are just staggering; if we had a fuel that could transport that energy from production? Energy problems would go away.)

Edit: Wanted to get the factoid before I posted it.

But just to go over; apaperin 2001 illustrated that even at 10% generation rate (Today's are significantly more efficient PE's can go up to 40% now); you'd only need about the area of South Dakota to produce all the earth's power needs. I'm not sure if CSP plants (Mirror based) have had the same increase in efficiency; but even at 10%, we'd generate so much that making the fuel would be trivial. The bottle neck right now really is just on site generation, not total generation. Also, other forms of power generation would be immensely more effecient, like the dams in the Southern U.S.--rather than losing all that energy pumping the electricity around, they could just make fuel and transport it to local generators.

The other huge benefit of this would also be more localized and less fragile energy infrastructures. Which is something wedesperatelyneed.
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No quibble with solar vs. fusion, I like solar as a power generation method as well. I just think compact fusion could be such a revolution in terms of local generation or on-vehicle generation that it'd change a lot of things. Fission is fine too, I think we should be moving completely away from fossil fuel technologies in general and for some reason, we just aren't doing it.
 
Lithose

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Cad_sl said:
No quibble with solar vs. fusion, I like solar as a power generation method as well. I just think compact fusion could be such a revolution in terms of local generation or on-vehicle generation that it'd change a lot of things. Fission is fine too, I think we should be moving completely away from fossil fuel technologies in general and for some reason, we just aren't doing it.
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Oh, I agree. I was saying, even if this fusion is a huge net loss in terms ofmakingthe actual fuel; it would still be a huge win, just because the main problem we have today is energy generationon site, not overall production . So, even if it costs say, 10 watts to produce 1 watts worth of fuel--as long as the reactor couldgeneratethat 1 watt at site with no side effects? It would still be a massive revolution in the way we can make power. (Because it would be fairly trivial to make the fuel in a desert somewhere, and then truck it to local fusion reactors).


Big Phoenix_sl said:
Wut about baseload?
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I'm sure I'm just being obtuse and you're fucking with me :p...But effectively, that's what this would be--a solution to Solar's base load problem. The main issue with Solar right now is holding the excess energy a solar plant can generate is..difficult. It requires molten salt, or gravity storage (Moving water up a hill) ect. This makes the footprint required pretty big and expensive (And Solar's footprint is already huge). It also still requires that you build the solar plant near where the energy is used; so you can't build it in the desert.

However, if we could make a very high density fuel; that we could "burn" on site (With no Co2 emissions). We could effectively just build huge solar or wind generators in the open/unused parts of the country--make the fuel--and transport it to on site generators. Right now, while we can use things like Molten Salt to save energy, it's not like we can transfer that stuff to local generators heh. (There has been some great techniques at making petrol products; but that is essentially just a more expensive fossil fuel at that point, may as well drill for it.)
 
Deathwing

Deathwing

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Irrational fear of nuclear energy? Also, throw in entrenched energy lobbying. So, I guess plural reasons, but still both are kinda obvious.
 
Deathwing

Deathwing

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That doesn't exclude fission power plants.

I think the conversation is a bit disjointed. I thought Cad was referring to nuclear energy as a whole. Power plants and other such applications if this reactor design proves out. If you throw portability into the argument as a current requirement, then of course fossil fuels win.
 
Cad

Cad

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The Ancient_sl said:
Oh see I thought the obvious answer was the fact that fossil fuels are portable and outrageously efficient.
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For cars there's obviously no nuclear/electric solution right now that works. For power plants, ships, etc; this type of compact fusion reactor would be amazing.
 
Cad

Cad

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Eomer_sl said:
Which is located directly next to a large body of water:Squaw Creek Reservoir - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Granted, not "ocean" large, but still large.
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Wasn't your original question about having to locate reactors near oceans exposing them to tsunamis etc? That reservoir is a man made lake for the purpose of providing cooling water. Yes the reactors use cooling ponds and cycle large amounts of water for heat management, but its not a geographic limitation. As pointed out, there are reactors nowhere near any oceans or seas.
 
Borzak

Borzak

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Eomer_sl said:
Which is located directly next to a large body of water:Squaw Creek Reservoir - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Granted, not "ocean" large, but still large. But fair enough, given some of the other examples, I guess it's not a big limiting factor in their placement.
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The three near here are located on the MS river along with 100+ chemical plants and refineries in about 100 river miles which are located there not only for shipping but for cooling water.
 
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