To: Bigjoe
You do understand, don't you, that uranium is one of the most common elements in the Earth's crust, and that it is sitting underneath the basement of almost every house. Do you think that everybody should abandon their homes?
Uranium has industrial uses such as ballast in ships...
No special problem with launch failure--
There will be no radioactivity until the reactor is activated.
That won't happen until the reactor is in orbit or on the moon or on Mars, or on some other deep-space mission.
Just last month Physics Today contained an article titled "NASA sees a future with nuclear power."
Describes presentday development of a 1.0 kW fission reactor called Kilopwer, intended to compete with solar power
Uses 30 kg of highly enriched uranium.
NERVA and KIWI used actual fission reactors producing up to 1,000 MW of heat.
The incoming fuel was liquid hydrogen or ammonia, and ultrahot hydrogen went out the nozzle.
Rockets powered by nuclear fission were under development in the USA from 1955 to 1972.
See Project Rover at Los Alamos.
And the NERVA and KIWI nuclear-powered rocket engines.
The reactor that came online a year ago was the Watts Bar reactor. It was the first reactor to come online in the USA in twenty years! And its construction started about forty years ago!
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You might be missing the point: Cost comparisons have no meaning in the nuclear game, because the players want infinite costs.
The problem of non-completion is more about psychology and financial greed than engineering. This problem afflicts ALL nuclear facilities- including the MOX...
The various cost issues are irrelevant in the USA, because its impossible to built a commercial reactor at any price.
E.g., look at South Carolina and Georgia.
Your statements apply to reactors fueled by deuterium-tritium. But reactors fueled only by deuterium are feasible in principle. And ALL the neutrons from the D-D reactions are available for producing isotopes, Pu-239 or otherwise. The fusion component of the first hydrogen bomb (“Mike”) was...
<< Post edited by a Mentor >>
Here is the meaning of dial-a-yield:
In essentially all modern nuclear weapons, the yield of the fission primary is “boosted” by D-T (deuterium-tritium) fusion reactions, where the D-T mixture is contained in a hollow cell buried somewhere inside the plutonium...
There will never be “cheap power from fusion.”—it would be the most expensive energy source of any type. It’s far more likely that fusion neutrons would be used to produce valuable isotopes (including u-no-what) rather than pressed into the task of boiling water.
This subject was treated (among other topics) in a recent article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists— http://thebulletin.org/fusion-reactors-not-what-they’re-cracked-up-to-be
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As for “fertile material,” It may not be difficult to get lots of depleted uranium (DU) There...
If fusion reactors based on DD reactions are developed, that will likely "lead to a situation of increased nuclear weapons proliferation", but not because of new techniques to generate fusion. The neutrons from the DD reactions can be absorbed in U238 to produce Pu239, and the tritium from the...