- #121
sloughter
- 19
- 0
When DOE first started funding the hot fusion program, did they require MIT before one dime flowed to prove that even IF they achieved hot fusion that the engineering considerations had a realistic chance of converting extremely energetic particles into electricity at 10cents/kWh, or was that just left up to the paeons, the engineers, to figure out? Would you steer me to a website from circa 1975 literature where MIT scientists connected the dots i.e. going from the plasma to electricity at 10 cents/kWh? There is no business model; utilities don't want expensive, complicated equipment that requires a Phd in physics to understand.
Light water reactors are simple; Mother Nature even built one in Oklo 1.7 billion years ago just to show you that you don't need physicists to build fission plants. Yet proponents of hot fusion will tell you, "We went from creating fission to commercial application in about 10 years. This should be possible with hot fusion reactors." Right!
As for the economics of plasma fusion: It requires incredibly complicated (does Murphy's law ring a bell?) unbelievably expensive equipment whose fuel right now costs as much as burning one carat diamonds in the reactor, and additional cooling towers even if Q=10, compared to either base-load coal or light-water reactors. Compared to that, we have simple, rapidly improving technology with free or cheap fuel and no cooling towers i.e. wind, solar, geothermal, and cellulose bio fuel. And, of course, the IFR has much cheaper fuel, is less complicated, has hundreds of years of reactor time under its belt, etc.
When were the hot fusion people going to tell America that there are small, but measurable amounts of the radioactive gas tritium released into the air as part of the cost of doing business? When were they going to tell Americans if tritium amounting to as little as a pound were stolen (start up amounts for a hot fusion reactor are about 10-12 pounds), it could be used to could convert a suitcase bomb into a bomb 1000 times the size of Nagasaki. Worried about suitcase bombs? You can buy tritium on line where you will also find a highly detailed schematic of a fission-fusion-fission bomb.
When were they going to tell Americans that the waste products of hot fusion are shorter-lived but more deadly than the waste from existing nuclear plants? This is a public relations time bomb just waiting to go off.
Now for the farcical Inertial Confinement Fusion program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. On Charlie Gibson, we have this real nifty cartoon showing the ICF plant firing every second. Let me get this straight---they are going to go from 100,000,000 degrees C to -260 degrees C (the temperature of a deuterium/tritium sand grain) in less than one second. Sounds reasonable doesn't it?
Of course the amount of energy seems pretty trivial to create enough to drive a base load plant, probably less than 300mW with just one gallon of gasoline/sec., the amount appearing from their trade literature. One minor detail---one pound of gasoline has the explosive equivalent of 15 pounds of dynamite. In other words we have the equivalent of 100 pounds of dynamite going off in the chamber every second!
Here are the steps: 1)Intake, 2)Compression, 3)Ignition, 4)Exhaust. Doesn't this sound like an internal combustion engine? Is this how we drive ICF reactors? Perhaps due to the wildly varying yield of each explosion, we could go with a flywheel, just like on a John Deere tractor. It would have to weigh at least 1000 tons and turn at a very rapid rate.
How long will it take to completely destroy the reactor vessel after thousands of explosions every day, not to mention the effect of the high energy neutrons on the reactor itself?
The deuterium/tritium particle entering the chamber will be about the size of a grain of sand. This requires Star Wars in a bottle i.e. we must be able to track a moving target and fire on it with tolerances in the neighborhood of trillionth of a second with over 100 lasers simultaneously. Sounds easy, doesn't it?
Now for the clincher. How do you isolate the lasers from a 100 pound stick of dynamite going off a few feet away? Suppose the laser zigs, when it should zag? How do you achieve ignition when the implosion front is all over the map due to the vibrating lasers. Bottom line, the reactors are going to have to cool off probably for over a minute, before the next sand grain of deuterium/tritium enters the champber; also, we must allow the lasers to calm down. Instead of one chamber, we might need as many as 60 chambers to get the amount of electricity ICF devotees believe is possible. Be prepared to pay $10/kWh for electricity generated by ICF.
As for fusion being the technology of the 22nd Century. Great! We've had pork for physicists for 35 years; now we can look forward to pork for physicists for another 100 years! Ever wonder where Dick Cheney learned how to funnel multi-billion no-bid contracts to Halliburton? He learned it from DOE and their multi-million dollar no-bid contracts to their hot fusion physicist buddies at MIT.
\QUOTE=Captainjf;1925304]I am in debate and i was instructed by my teacher to find negative evidence on the IFR reactor. is there anything wrong with the reactor that stands out alot?[/QUOTE]
Light water reactors are simple; Mother Nature even built one in Oklo 1.7 billion years ago just to show you that you don't need physicists to build fission plants. Yet proponents of hot fusion will tell you, "We went from creating fission to commercial application in about 10 years. This should be possible with hot fusion reactors." Right!
As for the economics of plasma fusion: It requires incredibly complicated (does Murphy's law ring a bell?) unbelievably expensive equipment whose fuel right now costs as much as burning one carat diamonds in the reactor, and additional cooling towers even if Q=10, compared to either base-load coal or light-water reactors. Compared to that, we have simple, rapidly improving technology with free or cheap fuel and no cooling towers i.e. wind, solar, geothermal, and cellulose bio fuel. And, of course, the IFR has much cheaper fuel, is less complicated, has hundreds of years of reactor time under its belt, etc.
When were the hot fusion people going to tell America that there are small, but measurable amounts of the radioactive gas tritium released into the air as part of the cost of doing business? When were they going to tell Americans if tritium amounting to as little as a pound were stolen (start up amounts for a hot fusion reactor are about 10-12 pounds), it could be used to could convert a suitcase bomb into a bomb 1000 times the size of Nagasaki. Worried about suitcase bombs? You can buy tritium on line where you will also find a highly detailed schematic of a fission-fusion-fission bomb.
When were they going to tell Americans that the waste products of hot fusion are shorter-lived but more deadly than the waste from existing nuclear plants? This is a public relations time bomb just waiting to go off.
Now for the farcical Inertial Confinement Fusion program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. On Charlie Gibson, we have this real nifty cartoon showing the ICF plant firing every second. Let me get this straight---they are going to go from 100,000,000 degrees C to -260 degrees C (the temperature of a deuterium/tritium sand grain) in less than one second. Sounds reasonable doesn't it?
Of course the amount of energy seems pretty trivial to create enough to drive a base load plant, probably less than 300mW with just one gallon of gasoline/sec., the amount appearing from their trade literature. One minor detail---one pound of gasoline has the explosive equivalent of 15 pounds of dynamite. In other words we have the equivalent of 100 pounds of dynamite going off in the chamber every second!
Here are the steps: 1)Intake, 2)Compression, 3)Ignition, 4)Exhaust. Doesn't this sound like an internal combustion engine? Is this how we drive ICF reactors? Perhaps due to the wildly varying yield of each explosion, we could go with a flywheel, just like on a John Deere tractor. It would have to weigh at least 1000 tons and turn at a very rapid rate.
How long will it take to completely destroy the reactor vessel after thousands of explosions every day, not to mention the effect of the high energy neutrons on the reactor itself?
The deuterium/tritium particle entering the chamber will be about the size of a grain of sand. This requires Star Wars in a bottle i.e. we must be able to track a moving target and fire on it with tolerances in the neighborhood of trillionth of a second with over 100 lasers simultaneously. Sounds easy, doesn't it?
Now for the clincher. How do you isolate the lasers from a 100 pound stick of dynamite going off a few feet away? Suppose the laser zigs, when it should zag? How do you achieve ignition when the implosion front is all over the map due to the vibrating lasers. Bottom line, the reactors are going to have to cool off probably for over a minute, before the next sand grain of deuterium/tritium enters the champber; also, we must allow the lasers to calm down. Instead of one chamber, we might need as many as 60 chambers to get the amount of electricity ICF devotees believe is possible. Be prepared to pay $10/kWh for electricity generated by ICF.
As for fusion being the technology of the 22nd Century. Great! We've had pork for physicists for 35 years; now we can look forward to pork for physicists for another 100 years! Ever wonder where Dick Cheney learned how to funnel multi-billion no-bid contracts to Halliburton? He learned it from DOE and their multi-million dollar no-bid contracts to their hot fusion physicist buddies at MIT.
\QUOTE=Captainjf;1925304]I am in debate and i was instructed by my teacher to find negative evidence on the IFR reactor. is there anything wrong with the reactor that stands out alot?[/QUOTE]
