Nuclear Power - Pros and Cons

Maybe I didn't express myself clearly. You don't just take 4 protons and fuse them - you take millions of protons and fuse them, 4 "each". The normal helium production of a proton gas fusion goes by intermediate steps, creating deuterium first, going to helium-3 via proton capture, which finally fueses to helium-4, for example. D-D fusion can emit neutrons by fusing to helium-3 with a 50% chance. The other variant is creating tritium, which will react with existing helium-3, deuterium or tritium to helium-4, emitting neutrons. You have no way of preventing this reactions in a proton gas from occuring. Even if you could do so by magically strippting all deuterium and tritium from the gas the moments it gets created, you'd be reducing the energy output by more than 99%. You are really having a far too simplified view on how fusion reactions work.

On a side note, 4 protons directly fusing to helium basically never happens because 4 particles meeting each other at once has such a low chance. This is a simplified explanasions only looking at starting material and end products. You (almost) always have intermediate steps, you can't ignore those. But apart from the explanation why the fusion process of a proton gas emits neutrons, there remains the fact that the reaction of protons to helium isn't even seen as a candidate for aneutronic fusion.

@Rufus
Not solved, but reduced. You still have the problem of neutrons passing through the shielding, especially if the used nuclei for the shielding have high mass. I know that research is heavy on resilient material, because it's almost required to make a fusion reactor work properly and economically. This is less about avoiding the lowly radioactive waste which isn't THAT much of a problem, and more about avoiding the material erosion.

I'm just going to sort of kind of hijack this thread if nobody minds, since it's long dead anyway. Beyond all the silly boring science stuff, let us discuss the ethics of weapons of mass destruction because that's always more interesting.

Would you say states have the right to possess nuclear weapons? If so, what about non-state entities? Does it depend on the intentions, or any extant international obligations? What?

edited 30th Jul '14 12:50:17 PM by Tyler

Uh-uh, nuclear "power" does not usually refer to nuclear weapons. So I would not discuss it here.

But it's so much hassle to start a new thread. :'(

"silly boring science stuff"

Good place to start on a highly Scientific topic.

Anyone know if there's been recent development on Thorium reactors? I used to hear a lot about them as safe, clean(er) replacements for uranium, but lately, no so much.

Do a new thread. See if the mods open it. Don't hijack a thread with a different topic in OTC.

Its called On-Topic Conversations after all.

My apologies. New thread in progress.

Necro-Ing this. Someone in the Japanese cultural thread wanted to discuss nuclear energy more

So an attempt at a new nuclear thread was started but appropriately current limits and regulations make it harder to start a new better thread then to simply reuse an old and slightly less well maintained one from way back.

So to rev the discussion, currently many nuclear power plants run on old technology, this is due in large part due to nuclear panic, basically the fear that nuclear power is scary and will doom us all. However even with such tech the safety record of nuclear power is pretty good, compare the death toll of worst accidents of nuclear power (the worst accidents being Fukushima, 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl) to other industries and nuclear comes out pretty dam good.

However because of this we don't get new nuclear power, the US stopped building new plants way back, Germany shut its down recently and other countries have similar fear. The U.K has currently outsources its nuclear plant work to China, which is liable to only make safety fears worse.

However despite all this nuclear power continues to be a very air pollution efficient way of generating power, France has been running on nuclear for a long time and had no serious issues.

The only technical (rather then political and psychological) challenge that nuclear does provide is that of waste, nuclear waste takes a hell of a long item to decay and there's a limit to how much space we have on the planet.

Anyway I'll leave it at that and see if that's enough to get this old beast going again.

edited 18th Apr '16 2:41:33 PM by Silasw

So put in some effort to reseeding the conversation, otherwise it'll just die. I said that in the other topic, too.

Like that.

edited 18th Apr '16 2:38:28 PM by Fighteer

isn't there a way to reuse the nuclear waste to generate more energy?

Yes, but those plants are not passivly safe.

With gen 4 reactors you have two options, "no risk of a disaster ever unless some one purposly causes it" and "burns off the fuel for more power"

Either of those are amazing benifits, but from a psycological standpoint it would probaly be easier to impliment the first if you could manage to educate people, then the later.

Maybe Gen 5 will find a way to combine them.

Regarding the problem of waste, my understanding is that the really nasty stuff (the stuff that's deadly for thousands of years, rather than "low-grade" waste like tools used on nuclear materials that are radioactive enough that you don't want to keep them around but not radioactive enough to pose much of an environmental threat) is largely a consequence of the type of reactors we use — and the reason we use those types of reactors is because they play nicely with the nuclear weapons production processes, which was a major concern at the height of the cold war when these reactors were being designed and built. There are other, franky much better types of reactors on the drawing board, but they've never been built due to the fact that all of our reactor experience is with the older types and no one really wants to be the first to try running a new type — again, mostly because nuclear is scary and "EXPERIMENTAL NEW REACTOR DESIGN!!!" is a worse headline than "reactor design with a proven record".

Even without using some radical new reactor design, nuclear technology has advanced quite a bit in efficiency and safety. The US allowing no new nuclear power plants to be built after TMI makes about as much sense as a car accident in 1979 halting all new car construction, and forcing everyone to keep driving their pre-1980 automobiles.

Granted, they have upgraded the existing plants and installed some new reactors, but you can't rebuild a Ford Model T into a Ford Mustang GT.

I'm all for it. With innovation, nuclear power can be made far safer than people think.

The real problem with nuclear power is that it's one of those things that's good policy but bad politics. No, nuclear power isn't perfect, but it's about the best we got at the moment. But a lot of people don't like it (including a lot of people who call themselves environmentalists, which annoys the hell out of me. Which is worse for the environment — nuclear waste, which affects relatively small areas and can be successfully contained, or greenhouse gas emissions, which affect the whole planet and can't be contained by any existing technology? Because they both have knock-on effects that last for thousands of years.), so a lot of politicians are leery about supporting it.

But is that true everywhere? Asia seems okay with nuclear power.

Environmentalists should be embracing nuclear power, since it produces zero carbon emissions.

And nature gives 0 shits about radiation compared to people.

._.;

I mean Chernobyl already has some species there adapted to it, ones that just don't care, and even a couple now DEPENDENT on it.

Like a gamma-radiation consuming mushroom.

Not only carbon emissions; due to the difference in shielding standards a nuclear plant actually releases less radiation to than a coal fired plant does as well.

The only major drawback to nuke plants is the storage of waste products and there's a ton of empty space we can toss it with minimal if any risk of contamination the earth; it's just a matter of the cost of getting it there and that'll almost certainly be coming down a lot in the next decade or so.

So then that leads to the question: What to do with existing waste? There is tech for making reactors more efficient and more safe, but what's the tech like for radioactive waste?

Burry it.

Yeah while national disposal might be problematic, international disposal shouldn't be that hard. There are bits of the earth we don't use where we could dump it, that's assuming space tech doesn't develope to the point where we could start dumping shit on the moon.

.... This is probably a horrible suggestion, but why not just bury it in Chernobyl...

I mean its not like its not already. ._.;

Is the exclusion zone big enough to fit it all?