Nerd stuff.

Guru

Journeyman
Joined
May 4, 2012
Messages
51
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Gillette, Wyo
#3
Awesome Conversation I had with a guy from Lawrence Livermore Labs.

"Levon L. - I wonder if they are starting to figure out the palladium-deuterium fusion then."

"Robert Stei**** - Energy scarcity is a larger and more serious problem than CO2 in the atmosphere (more than 2 billion people on a planet of 7 billion have no access to electricity).
As population density increases, diffuse energy schemes, and dedicating the land they require to produce power, will be less and less feasible.
High density energy solutions will be favored in a world of high population density, and forms of energy that produce energy most cleanly will be favored.

Thorium LFTRs can completely extract all of the energy in fertile Thorium fuel (less Thorium ore has to be mined - less nuclear waste has to be sequestered). Practical forms of fusion that produce helium (and very small amounts of Thorium fission products) as nuclear waste use a small amount of U-233 fissile to reliably produce fusion which is about 4X times more energy dense than even Thorium/U-233 fission. The deuterium fuel in the ocean is about 10^8 times more abundant than the official USGS worldwide estimates for economically extractable Thorium. Using U-233 to ignite more abundant fusion deuterium from sea water increases the amount of energy that can be produced from the worldwide Thorium resources by > 100 times.
http://goo.gl/Ji0r2

Note: The complete conversion of deuterium nuclear fuel releases an energy content of 250 x 10^15 joules per metric ton of deuterium. The quantity of deuterium in the world’s oceans is estimated at 4.6 x 10^13 metric tons. Deuterium present in seawater will yield around 5 x 10^11 TW-years of energy.
Worldwide Th-232 estimate from USGS = 1,660,000 metric tons which when fully consumed in a LFTR will produce about 1,660 TW-years of energy.

The deuterium in seawater then is 3.125 x 10^8 times larger an energy resource than the energy that could be produced from worldwide economically extractable Thorium resources."

" Levon L. - Now, how does tritium fit in to the energy equation? I was going over the MAP-21 law and found an interesting little blurb about that. The most I could find about tritium was for nuclear detectors and as a refrigerant (as helium3 ?)."

"Robert Stei**** - Levon, Tritium has industrial uses currently (non-electrically lighted self luminous Exit Signs for public buildings, movie theaters, etc)
http://www.theexitstore.com/exit_sign_info/facts-about-tritium-signs.htm
There will also be a growing market for tritium for D-T fusion in the coming years. It takes about 150 kgs of Tritium and 100 kgs of Deuterium to produce 1GW of fusion power for a year. In contrast, it requires about 1000 kgs of Thorium to produce 1GW of energy in a LFTR reactor for a year.
There are few current sources of tritium, mostly LWRs, and it is expensive. LFTRs could be used to produce Tritium for fusion reactors by wrapping a Lithium blanket (ideally Li-6) around the LFTR and bombarding the lithium with neutrons.
Fusion reactors should ultimately be able to breed their own Tritium sustainably. D-D fusion, a slightly more difficult fusion reaction, produces some Tritium as it operates, Tritium produced in a fusion reactor can be separated from the non-radioactive helium produced in the fusion reactor target chamber, and then used as fuel in D-T fusion reactors.

While most fusion reactor approaches struggle to produce any net energy from even the least taxing D-T fusion reaction, fission ignited fusion started out, in the Ivy Mike test of 1952, producing energy from D-D fusion right from the first test. When you use the high energy density of nuclear fission to initiate fusion, it is much easier to produce fusion in pure D-D fusion plasmas without requiring any Tritium."
 

Guru

Journeyman
Joined
May 4, 2012
Messages
51
Location
Gillette, Wyo
#4
Another interesting conversation concerning the SSTAR reactor.

Levon - What, precisely, needs to be done before there are working reactors? I remember reading, a while back, about the SSTAR reactor. What is currently holding that up?

http://www.thorium.tv/en/thorium_reactor/thorium_reactor_1.php

Christopher W**** - "Understanding the dynamics of pure U233 fission, it has a different personality from U235 with a lower dose of delay neutrons. This could pose control/surge problems...or it could be no problem at all, depends on a lot of things, more study needed (even MORE reason not to destroy that U233). Need a better means of capturing and understanding the dynamics of tritium in the reactor, and heat exchanger (most likely an easy task, but it needs to be studied). Need better understanding and developmental of brayton cycles for this reactor type, current brayton cycles are based around combustion of NAT gas, not salt exchange loops. Better understanding of salt dynamics in general for both large scale and small scale reactor cores (like potential other salt candidates, and LI7 purification techniques). A path for licencing since it is a disruptive technology. A better understanding of the material wear of fission products on the alloy. Testing on feasibility and depth of dynamic fission product extraction, as well as fuel volatility extraction.

This isn't exhaustive, there is a good amount of work to do. It is important to note that most of these problems were known about in the MSRE, they wanted to make a larger scale reactor to start working through them. They didn't feel like any one of them in particular was a deal breaker, and that was 50 years ago. There will be challenges to be sure, but there are some great minds out there read to tackle the challenge."
 

Guru

Journeyman
Joined
May 4, 2012
Messages
51
Location
Gillette, Wyo
#6
Quantum Batteries.

"To understand the concept of quantum batteries, we need to start (unsurprisingly) at a very low level. Today, most devices and machines that you interact with are governed by the rules of classical mechanics (Newton’s laws, friction, and so on). Classical mechanics are very accurate for larger systems, but they fall apart as we begin to analyze microscopic (atomic and sub-atomic) systems — which led to a new set of laws and theories that describe quantum mechanics.

In recent years, as our ability to observe and manipulate quantum systems has grown — thanks to machines such as the Large Hadron Collider and scanning tunneling electron microscopes — physicists have started theorizing about devices and machines that use quantum mechanics, rather than classical. In theory, these devices could be much smaller, more efficient, or simply act in rather unsurprising ways. In this case, Robert Alicki of the University of Gdansk in Poland, and Mark Fannes of the University of Leuven in Belgium, have defined a battery that stores and releases energy using quantum mechanics."

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/...d-batteries-could-be-the-perfect-power-source
 

orange

Veteran and General Yakker
Joined
Jul 6, 2010
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Broken beyond repair but highly affable
#11
It's obvious that Ma has the hots for Pa'a mil-spec, Levon. :sex:

That's heavy stuff :cool:
 

orange

Veteran and General Yakker
Joined
Jul 6, 2010
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Broken beyond repair but highly affable
#15
I thought the 'twisted laser' part was worth the whole thing...
 
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