I’ve sent this idea to the Max Plank Institut and also the US Atomic Energy Commission. I’m still waiting for their reply . But if any of you care to see it ,in advance , before world-wide adoption,here it is :
Forget about electricity from controlled fusion . It’s centuries away! Instead , lets rethink uncontrolled fusion :smack:
dig a humongous ditch ( I’m talking like, the size of Manhattan)
fill with water
make sure that the water has only one possible exit pathway ,one that will direct the water uphill , into another humongous ditch.
4)set off a hydrogen bomb, the smallest sized one possible, at the bottom of the water.
the water will be shot uphill toward the empty ditch.
6) at your leasure , let the water run downhill back to the original ditch , turning electric turbines in the process !
7) repeat as often as you need .
I figure that if we use a super laser to detonate the H bomb , we will have hardly any radiation to worry about . As for the location of the ditches , any desolate location should do ( ex Saudi Arabia,etc)
Why do you figure that? Even if you don’t use a fission trigger to detonate it, deuterium fusion still releases neutrons. All of our H bombs use deuterium; we don’t have the technology to generate the conditions required for pure hydrogen fusion. You will get a lot of radiation to worry about.
I saw a proposal for an energy generation scheme years ago which involved detonating nuclear bombs in enormous steel-lined underground chambers filled with some working fluid, which would be vaporized by the blast and fed through turbines to generate power. Similar concept to your idea and same problem - lots of radioactive waste left over.
Some of the latest fusion reactor concepts are similar to this, involving a fusion fuel pelled blasted on all sides by “super lasers” to initiate fusion. They’re still nowhere near making an actual power plant.
True ! We are nowhere near the required laser technology. But that’s because we’re spending billions on stupid tokamax’s ( or whatever they call them ) I’m sure we can do it with more bucks !And don’t forget that the people who worked on bombarding the fission fuel pellets ,unsuccessfully, with “super-lasers” were still working under the constraints of creating a controlled reaction,not a free, uncontrolled one.
As for the neutrons , well , at least they don’t comtaminate the world for thousands of years like fission devices do. They get released and -guess what, they’re gone ! They don’t stick around.
Actually, they do stick around. Or rather, they hit other atoms and stick to them, making them into radioactive isotopes. One of the expected problems with fusion plants, should we ever get one functionally operational, is that the reactor parts will become radioactive after long-term use, and will have to be disposed of as radioactive waste after the reactor is dismantled.
Of course they stick around; they penetrate or they’re absorbed. Neutron absorption creates radioisotopes, and neutron penetration leads to absorption somewhere else. There would also be some fairly high-energy photons (gamma radiation), as well as a large dose of earth moving.
Basically, you’re talking about using an H-bomb as a pump. I don’t think putting a nozzle on an H-bomb is going to give you the kind of useful work you’re looking for.
Assuming for a moment that you are serious; Are you going to actually cap the ditch to prevent the water leaving it in an upward direction? if so, what material do you propose to use (it needs to withstand the almost the full force of the shock wave, which will travel through the water very well); if you don’t plan to cover the ditch, how do you propose to prevent the water simply being vapourised and otherwise propelled into the air, missing the channel to the upper ditch altogether?
My dreams of free,unlimited energy have been dashed into a million pieces ! It’s back to the drawing board.mmmmmmm… Maybe if we take a trillion hamsters and put them in a wheel the size of New Jersey…?
Or you could just dig the ditch near the sea, then let the tide fill it and run it back out again at low tide; in theory, you could run turbines off it in both directions and dispense with all of those nasty nuclear bombs, but that’s hardly a new idea
So is coal; probably most oil too (although some of it could have been fuelled by chemosynthesis at the bottom of deep ocean trenches); in any case, it’s all solar in a manner of speaking since everything you see around you is made of dead stars.
Yoou’re joking aren’t you; you could put it (and the bodies of the hamsters as they <ahem> expire through a digester to produce copious quantities of methane; the solid residues could also be burnt to generate power
