This is pure opinion: I recall, back in the 80’s, a small article in a technical journal, wherein a company offered a power source based on Strontium 90 decay, as a driver for buoy lights and other small items for the US Navy. They said it was about the size of an office trash can, and had an output of about 50 amps at 440 volts. One problem was that once you turned it on, it was ON, no throttling, no off, and the electron flow would last as long as the half life of the Strontium 90, something like 50 years.
It was a one week wonder, then POOF! Into the Memory Hole. I’ve always wondered if it vanished because it was nonsense, or because it dawned on some Pentagon deep thinker that perhaps the Navy shouldn’t talk about this. Something along the lines of some small company in Seattle saying, “Guess what we built?” and a week later, the Navy in DC said, “You said WHAT?, to WHO?”
You don’t suppose, some Harvard educated flack at Lockheed heard a rumor, last October, put it out, and is now looking for penguins to poll in Adak, Alaska, on the Walrus threat?
Exhibit: Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators of the US Navy, an unclassified 1978 report by the Naval Nuclear Power Unit. (Yes, it’s a PDF, and a fairly ugly one – a scan of a photocopy, it seems.) Talks extensively about the various applications and fuels already in use in Navy systems. Those missions seem to be ground systems used in polar conditions, undersea equipment, or unattended buoys and gauges. Often using Strontium-90 RTGs.
ETA: Check out Chapter 4. Apparently, a comprehensive catalog of RTGs in use by the Navy as of that date, including extensive technical specs.
An episode of NOVA about ten years ago included a bit where two homeless Russian men showed up at a hospital (in Russia) with acute radiation poisoning. Turned out they had been living in the woods and stumbled upon a couple of small, old Soviet-era radioisotope generators that had just been dumped out there. They had no idea what they were, but they were still generating lots of heat so the guys hung out next to them (like a campfire) for a couple days.
And in regards to this latest column: What does the illustration mean? I get the skunk for Lockheed’s Skunkworks, the DEMO and ITER acronyms, and the apple ‘core’, but why is it all being dreamed up by a spider in a business suit holding a cigar?? Is it some kind of, “…said the spider to the fly” analogy of Lockheed trying to lure us into believing it?
I studied fusion reactor design back in college which was a long time ago. From what I remember the numbers tend to drive the design toward larger reactors for efficiency improvement. So going to a smaller design seems a little strange, as does an aircraft company jumping into fusion research.
The idea of assisting containment using the plasma current’s self generated magnetic field is nothing new. All tokamak designs take advantage of this in their own designs. But, it isn’t enough on its own hence the applied power going into the massive electro-magnets for the magnetic containment bottle. I can only guess, and it is a guess, that they have reason to believe going to a smaller vessel size will make the plasma current denser. Denser current will make the self generated magnetic field denser and that this scales appropriately with plasma current growth. That it will scale such that the field can contain the plasma and keep it compressed for heating and pressure purposes. That is the only thing I can come up with that might explain the smaller reactor size. But, like I said it has been a very long time since I studied fusion reactor design so I could be talking gibberish.
Yeah, they’re not really “an aircraft company” anymore.
I mean, Northrop-Grumman was another company formed by merging big aircraft companies, and from 2001 to 2011 they made, among other things, nuclear aircraft carriers.
You’d be amazed what gets made by who these days.
It really frustrates me that nuclear power plant waste is being wasted. It is still putting out energy and being left idle, but at great expense to keep under control. Living in Canada I can see a terrible waste of a source of heat. Even if it is not converted to electricity. Waste heat from some, though too few, electric generation plants is diverted to useful purposes. But “waste” nuclear material is truly going to waste. There are reactor designs that can actually use it for electricity generation on a lower scale. Safer as well. The thermal energy is even easier to use. The biggest obstacle being the public’s fears. We should be educating the public as to how much safer this lower level use is. Then start using it. Storing this stuff at generating sites is less safe than using it for benefit in properly designed systems. Fukashima being a good example. Everyone fears this stuff, yet leaves it sitting idle, in sub optimal storage. Frustrating.
Someone might just as easily have said “Hey, how well is it going to go over if we scatter radioisotopes in buoys all over the bay so that boats can run into them? Think there’d be any fallout from that?”
And, what’s this got to do with fusion power? :dubious:
One thing people tend not to recognize is how fundamentally different fission and fusion are. I see a lot of posts in this thread related to fissionable ores and their byproducts, ie, nuclear waste, thermo-electric reactor/generators are all driven by fissionable materials that are inherently radioactive. Fusion has nothing to do with fissionable ores like uranium or strontium, etc. It is a fundamentally different process where gases are are compressed at solar like pressures and temperatures to produce a fusion reaction. So those discussions involving fissionable materials really have nothing to do with the topic of fusion.
See: Traveling wave reactor - Wikipedia. The problem is that it would be a new reactor design, requiring testing certification and all that. Only a government and in these days of austerity, no government is interested. But this poster is absolutely correct: this would get an order of magnitude more power out of a given load of Uranium and solve the nuclear waste problem to boot.
And I know this has nothing at all to do with fusion.
One idea that has always fascinated me was one my physics professor suggested. According to her, a Ph.D. candidate in nuclear physics, there are methods were by you could encase pellet sized pieces of nuclear waste in a ceramic which would render it safe. The idea was you could toss the thing into a water heater in your house and have hot water without any electricity or natural gas. The ceramic’s encasement would be strong enough to survive being tossed in lava. (hmm maybe Sauron should have tried that with his ring.)
Well in truth, I never said there wouldn’t. Still you don’t have the byproducts of refining fissionable ores, the fuel itself, and all the contaminated materials from being in contact with those ores.
With a fusion reactor the reactor vacuum chamber will be exposed to heavy neutron bombardment. So the steel vessel would be radioactive. Anywhere the neutron flux can reach will become radioactive over time. It is a much, much smaller problem.
Maybe the nuclearites could distribute small amounts of low-level waste to interested parties to power their houses. A mini-nuclear generator in every home !
Mao would approve.