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Fission in a Box
Jim Howard writes: "The The World and I magazine has an article suggesting the following interesting possibility: 'Advances in South Africa and the Netherlands suggest that small-scale fission machines could become safe, reliable, and inexpensive sources of electricity and heat for ships, factories, and perhaps single-family homes.' Well worth a look, if only for the review of nuclear power basics." Don't hold your breath, because technical obstacles aren't the main ones. But it's a nice overview of the science behind small reactors.
Great! I would like you, then, to estimate the cost of everything you buy using that methodology and pay the difference between that price and the price it's been marked at to one or more organizations that are doing said cleanup work. Accordingly, when you buy a gallon of gasoline for $2, I expect you to send the Sierra Club or some similar organization $5. When you pay your $50 electric bill, I expect you to send $80 to repair damaged river systems. And so on. If you are doing this already, I applaud your honesty and integrity (though I question your intelligence). If you are not, then begone with you, for you are nothing but a hypocrite. Do not expect others to pay when you are not yourself willing.
I'm living in California...the reason for the so-called electricity crisis is none other than hypocrisy. Those who oppose the construction of generation facilities should have their power turned off first. When that law is passed, I expect very little opposition to such construction. In a democracy, it's easy to protest this and that without it having much effect on you personally, because you know that if your viewpoint makes it into law, the vast majority of the cost will be borne by others (who may or may not agree with you) simply because there are more people who are not you (millions) than who are (1). When the minority of complainers suddenly has to foot the entire bill for its ideals the game changes - suddenly a "social conscience" isn't so popular a thing to have.
This is a fundamental problem with the type of government most advanced nations have. I don't have a real solution (well, I do, but it involves replacing this form of government with a much different one). In the meantime, it might be of interest to consider that the externalities usually thought to be the reason environmental damage occurs in the first place are just as much an issue in the fight against it. After all, how much does it cost you to protest the construction of an electricity generation facility? How much does it cost others when your protest succeeds? That scenario is the definition of an externality.
ess people out of work = less crime less people out of work = a larger consumer market
You're forgetting, cheap energy = lower production cost. Lower production cost = lower consumer cost (in a healthy market), lower consumer cost = higher demand. Higher demand = expanded production. Expanded production = more jobs.
In what way?
Imagine we were all still riding around in horsedrawn buggies because we didn't want to seriously reduce the demand for: buggy whip makers, street cleaners, horse breaders, blacksmiths, veterinarians, etc, etc.
Also, considering that the most likely deployment of these reactors will be in the elefctrical generation industry, I fail to see how the workers will be displaced. They will just get some additional safety training (I hope!) and go from working on gas turbines powered by natural gas to gas turbines powered by fission.
The Beauty of the design in question is that it won't explode in the sense most people think of.
There could be explosive decompression of the working gas, but since it's helium, it won't be particularly harmful. (Nor will it be terribly radioactive). The fuel itself would remain confined to the 'pebbles'.
While it would suck to be the person that managed to get one open w/o protective gear, the neighbors would most likely suffer no ill effects.
I have two major objections to the use of nuclear power. The liklihood of a core accident and waste handling.
This system appears to answer my first concern. Unlike most reactors in use in the U.S. this one seems to be intrinsically stable under failure conditions. (I would certainly classify total loss of coolant a failure state!).
The real question is waste handling. It seems that the fuel design will keep the waste contained over the operational life of the fuel. The question is processing after use. Are the pebbles to be somehow disassembled and reprocessed (possably after a cooldown period) or will they be disposed of as is? How long will the pebbles contain the fission products after use? Any possability of using their intrinsic heat generation for a smaller scane energy production (perhaps using sterling engines to extract useful power)?
I suspect that in the real world, their careful handling will extend exactly as far as their useful life + public oversite. After that, they will be disposed of in the cheapest possable way w/o reguard to long term safety. It's the american way.
If the pebbles are intrinsically sound enough containment for long term storage and preferably useful for secondary energy production, this could be feasible and at least no more destructive to the environment than current fossil fuel use.
> A Nevada resident with more than enough power from zero emmissions Hoover Dam.
You don't get nearly enough from the Hoover Dam. IIRC, Nevada only gets 25% of the power from Hoover Dam, which only covers 13% of Las Vegas's power needs. Even if you somehow got the California and Arizona to relinguish their share of the power from Hoover Dam, that still wouldn't cover Las Vegas's power needs. The lion's share of Nevada's power comes from fossil fuels.
Not only do you get power for your house, but as a by-product, you can use the waste heat to heat your pool, and the Cerenkov radiation will light it at night!
Just don't go in the deep end!
Actually, looking into an operating nuclear reactor is an eye-opening experience. If you live near a university with a reactor, chances are they have a tour of it every now and then. It becomes far less scary when you can see it.
Would you rather have another Chernobyl, or another Venus?
"The Idiot is a diversion, mind the crooks in the background."
That's a *very* intriguing idea, metis. Please, expand upon it!
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Hmmm... and didn't humans most likely evolve in South Africa?
I wonder if we're all nuclear babies...
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And now we have another example of technical overconfidence. Fission power may well turn out to be useful in many ways, but it will not be solve the thrird world and california's energy problems. It will also be dangerous.
Traditional nuclear power comes from fission, the breaking apart of atoms. It isn't anything new. Nobody is talking about fusion, the combining of atoms.
Fission power is what fuels the hydrogen bomb, and we are proposing that we put fission reactors in everyone's home?
Well, except you nobody is talking about fusion. The hydrogen bomb is fussion based, NOT FISSION. It combines hydrogen atoms together - it fuses them. The older atomic bombs America dropped in World War I were fission.
I suppose to be technical there is fission in a hydrogen bomb used to set off the fusion reaction, but it isn't the main source of the explosive power. That is the fusion.
So the artical is talking about the same reaction used in current power plants, just scaled down.
Ben
The only way to sustainably use fission is to make plutonium in breeder reactors and then use that, isn't it? Additionally, isn't plutonium about the nastiest stuff you can ever deal with?
Go you big red fire engine!
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
for the obvious reason - if you're selling enriched uranium at the friendly local corner store, you've just made life a heck of a lot easier for your friendly local terrorists to build a nuclear weapon. Yes, I am aware that there's more to it than that (for instance, you need an enrichment plant to produce near-pure U235, quite a bit of knowledge about conventional explosives to trigger it, particularly if you're going to use an implosion design, etc. etc. etc.), but having a supply of uranium is a necessary prerequisite, and it's something that is currently at least somewhat difficult to obtain.
Go you big red fire engine!
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I think it's worth mentioning that running nuclear "waste" through again is being done in two places -- in Canada with stuff imported from the USA, and in France imported from Germany. In both cases rapid environmentalists were laying down on the roads to stop it coming in... (in Canada, they flew it in by helicopter instead to get around the block).
I think the biggest issue with small scale nuclear reactor operations is security--the potential for sabotage or theft is a big concern. There are probably groups out there that would sabotage an early pioneering installation, with no regard to loss of human life, to poison the waters for future development.
we just assume that reactor was natural. What would our reactors look like in 2 billion years? Could we tell that they were artifical? For all we know, an alien species had a base here.
I agree whole-heartedly :)
I think a better idea would be to take the suggestion that others have made on this thread, and use a liquid-metal reactor that just keeps burning the waste until it's down to practically nothing. It's more energy efficient and cleaner to boot.
Still, as long as people are afraid of a possible china syndrome or chernobyl, this isn't likely to be a very popular solution.
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Finding God in a Dog
Actually, it's fusion, the uniting of two or more atoms of hydrogen isotope into helium, that powers the hydrogen bomb. Fission, the splitting of the atom into smaller atoms, is what powers all those nuclear bombs that are sitting in Russian, Chinese, American, etc. silos, waiting to destroy us all.
Just a minor point, but I thought it might help to clarify just what we should all be skeptical of here.
Why not? The biggest problem with the modern electrical system, imo, is transmission and distribution. Fuck it; if we can produce our own power, let the power companies wither on the vine. In many cases, they richly deserve it.
I agree, for different reasons (such as: what do we do with the nuclear waste???). Although I adamantly believe that nuclear power is nowhere nearly as evil as the present practise of burning fossil fuels to produce electricity.
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Finding God in a Dog
It's funny that the proposal comes from South Africa, because there were quite a few natural nuclear ractors nearby, such as in Oklo , in Gabon. (here is a more technical article, and a cross-section diagram, neatly labelled in Japanese). And, of course, you can expect it to be threatened by mining...
(Here is my google search for the stuff).
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That's as long there's no bunch of monkeys running around and undoing by hand what the automatic control system does, like at Three-Mile-Island...
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This is total bunk. That carbon dioxide would be STILL released in the atmosphere if the plants did rot on the ground, were burned (duh?) or eaten (where do you think the carbon dioxyde we exhale comes from?).
It's just fingerpointing by people who don't like dams.
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A signifigant fraction of the heat generated is from the radioactive decay of fission products. For many reactor designs, this decay heat is enough to raise the fuel temperatures to damaging levels if it is not removed.
Noted; thanks for the tip. I'm working under the (perhaps foolish) assumption that current designs and fuel replacement policies are set up to prevent this from being a hazard.
It sounds like you are describing a negative temperature coefficient of reactivity ("negative void coefficient" if you are a civilian). In a water-moderated reactor, an increase in temperature will reduce moderator density therefore cause a tendency for power to decrease. This provides for negative feedback and causes reactor power to change to match the heat removed from the system without operator intervention. This does not prevent an over power condition - it just means that the reactor is inherently stable.
Again, this depends on the design of the reactor. One of the big selling points of the slowpoke was that there was no configuration that would lead to an overpower condition (pull all of the control rods out, and it's still in a stable regime).
Academic in this case, though, because the article wasn't talking about slowpoke reactors (I'd misunderstood initially).
On the off chance that this wasn't just good satire:
Trivial as it may seem, energy gained by tidal power is, erg for erg, slowing down the rotation of the Earth. True right now the results are inconsequential, but if massive projects were undertaken to supply 30% of the Earth's onging power needs with tidal forces, over the long run it could have an impact, and it's not exactly like we have a way to repair the damage by speeding up the Earth's rotation...
There's on the order of 1.0e30-1.0e31 joules of energy stored in the Earth's rotation. That gives us around 30 billion terawatt-years.
I don't think we're in danger of draining it soon.
At least clean fission only eats up matter which, though not a renewable resource either, is constantly being replenished on the order of tons a day from micrometeorites.
...which are made of rock, and thus don't contain much hydrogen. Allegations of a continuing hail of ice micro-comets are as yet unsubstantiated.
Not to worry, though. Even if we just extract deuterium (which is 0.015% of all hydrogen) for fusion, we have about 1.0e13 tonnes of the stuff in the oceans. Assuming around a million times the energy yield of chemical reactions, this gives us about 5 million terawatt-years.
Switch to ordinary hydrogen, and by the time the sun burns out, we'd have used around 15% of the ocean. Assuming we don't ship in a few ice asteroids in the interim.
you dont put your material in barrels and hope it stays there, you encase it in solid glass. that way even as it breaks up the material is still encapsulated. Also most subduction zones are a couple hundred miles off coastlines, and under alot of salt water. You arent going to be drilling there for groundwater any time soon.
I've already been assuming that the barrels are filled with glass pellets. I still wouldn't want the barrels to break. Shatter the beads, and currents will take the resulting dust all over. Disperse a pollutant in the water, and it *won't* just stay in one place - you'll eventually have to worry about it (especially if we're dumping all of a continent's waste, and not just one plant's worth).
If you have a really deep hole, and plug it really well - maybe. But I'd still feel safer with the barrels deep in the continental shield.
The graphite-laced "pebbles" in their reactor could melt down if enough were piled in one place
No, they won't. They are designed to keep the bits of fuel far enough apart that no reaction hot enough to start burning either the fuel itself or its carbon shell could start or sustain itself.
This has actually been tested by running a pebble-bed reactor without coolant for an extended period.
I meant, a pile larger than would fit in the reactor. A large enough pile should indeed melt down. The reaction will increase exponentially if the probability of interaction (vs. escape or absorption) is greater than one divided by the number of child neutrons produced by a reaction.
The probability of absorption (by the graphite or by a nucleus) depends on how far a neutron would have to travel to escape the pile. Use a bigger pile, and there's less chance of the neutron escaping.
If fissile material was sparse enough inside the fuel balls, then you could set it up so that an arbitrarily large pile still wouldn't enter meltdown, but this would make it a lot less useful for generating power as well (a small pile would be very, very subcritical).
if you keep it in a lead box, within another lead box, and allow only authorized technicians to service and maintain it, then I think there wouldnt be much worry as long as everyone does their part safely
And therein lies the biggest problem: you're relying on *everyone* to do their part safely, *all* of the time, for all of the reactors that are ever installed.
One screwup (accidental or delibarate), and you've just astronomically jacked up the cancer rate for everyone in the area for the next 50,000 years or so.
Good luck getting these insured.
The current scheme - using a few big, well-monitored plants - is much safer.
Also, FYI, lead will corrode relatively quickly (and I'm ignoring earthquakes and other disasters).
Wasn't slowpoke (and most early research reactors) water boilers with an aqueous solution of uranyl-sulfate or something? No fuel rods, I think... just a big liquid solution with fuel mixed in.
I'll have to look that up; thanks for the pointer.
My understanding was that at least some versions used fuel rods, but I haven't checked in quite a while.
Lastly, the "slowpoke" style of reactor described can't have runaway heating at all. As it heats up, the core expands, pushing the fuel rods away from each other and making the reactor less efficient.
My mistake, the article refers to a different type of reactor.
The graphite-laced "pebbles" in their reactor could melt down if enough were piled in one place, as graphite will stay put under meltdown temperatures (the fuel, steel, and graphite will alloy with each other and whatever's underneath them as they heat up). The PBMR is thus open to abuse.
A meltdown still won't cause a nuclear explosion. It just makes a hot molten mess that's very radioactive.
There is a solution to the nuclear waste problem, burn it. I dont mean with fire, i mean in a reactor. so called nuclear "waste" is waste because it can no longer be used by a conventional nuclear pwer plant. There are power plant designs that would use fuel rods until all of the fissionable material is used. Look on google for the Advanced Liquid Metal reactor. Fuel is recycled until all the uranium and plutonium has fissioned into lesser elements, some with half lives of days, rather than millions of years.
According to two different descriptions of ALMRs, you only end up burning the heavy waste products (actinides) with this scheme.
Radioactive lighter elements may be bred to something more stable, but stable ligher elements are just as easily bred into medium-lifetime radioactive isotopes.
Aren't there some serious problems with leakage of these containers into the groundwater table? I seem to remember hearing something akin to that...
That depends on where you bury them.
The proposals I've most recently heard about involve either burying them a few miles deep in the Canadian Shield - bedrock that water doesn't flow through - or burying them a few miles deep under the ocean floor, with the holes plugged with clay (which water doesn't flow through readily).
Both should work long enough for most of the products to decay, even if the containers don't last anywhere close to that long. The containers are mainly to protect it during transport and during temporary storage (accidents could have nasty consequences without these precautions).
I would not at all be suprised if Bush accomplishes more that Clinton and Gore on global warming and other fundamental environmental issues. The problem is that the press is willing and able to exploit the slightest bit of hestitation on Bush's because he is a Republican and was previously involved in oil.
Where is it written that the President must do dog and pony shows for the press, especially when they've exhibited such willingness to play up every little slipup. Anyways, I happen to have liked Reagan.
The man lied under oath and had sex with an intern in the White House. If he were the chief executive of any company or even lesser government official he would be gone in a second. Don't even act like Clinton didn't bring it on himself. They couldn't find a thing on the man? Feh. They found out that he perjured himself. As for "finding" stuff, we have this thing called a court of law...it sorta makes things difficult. Clinton is dirty, you can deny it all you want, but he's dirty.
No, Bush clearly knows how to relate to people. That matters in politics. He may not have the rhetorical skills that Clinton has, but those are two entirely different things.
No, other people are running this government, unlike another certain president that thought he was some kind of genius, he didn't try to micromanage. He has very good people and he's using them properly as far as I am concerned.
Education reforms. Military reforms. Taxes. Etc. You may dislike his policy, but he's focused on them. Clinton on the other hand tried to be all things to all people and I frankly thing he didn't accomplish much as a result. If he had focused his energies on a few really important issues, he would have been far more effective.
Yes his policy is largely alligned with mine, though not entirely. Although I couldn't care a rats ass about the Christian right, so to speak, I'd rather have them merely kept in a corner then have someone that is unwilling to, say, make any real changes in education for fear of pissing off the teachers' unions.
Totally unsubstantiated by ANY respectable media source. In fact, such drugs were not even in vogue when he was in school, it's nothing more than a rumor.
Heh what dirty tricks would those be exactly? The one where he gets an endorsement?
Which, by all accounts, can hardly be blamed on him, but rather on the market and lack of oil.
Uh, you do know that the media actually did inspect the ballots and found that even if they used Gore's proposed method, that Bush would have actually PICKED up votes overall? But that's besides the point? What dirty tricks specifically? Prove them.
His people for one. You don't keep staff like that by being an asshole.
Anyways, this is pointless. You may be well to the left, but it is NOT a given that Bush is an idiot, stupid, unethical, or whatever. If you've been paying any attention to the "people", you'll find that a solid majority of the country STILL approves of him. So by the Democrat's meter during the impeachment, everything is peachy, right? Or are you going to say that some things matter more now? That's what I thought.
So name a significant country that actually contradicts this trend. Then compare that to all the countries and times that confirm it.
You can argue anything if you so desire, but that doesn't mean that the facts bear it out. All sorts of countries work for less than the United States (not to mention most of the Western world), yet we continue to have low unemployment and overall rising standards of living. The same goes for many other enlightened countries.
You're even assuming that consumer purchase power is reduced. That's simply not the case and it's been demonstrated time and time again. What generally happens is that consumer's purchasing power rises on the aggregate, because goods and services get produced for less.
This is completely incoherant. Where are you getting this stuff from, off the back of a cereal box? How does a market failure result from continual innovation and increased efficiency? And wtf is slump supposed to mean in this context? How do you get from point A to point B? It does not follow.
Yes, you do get more leisure time. When you extropolate this pattern of increasing efficiency out across all people, it means that people on the whole can work much much less and recieve far more. In other words, before the days of tractors, fertilizers, combines, and such, mere existence demanded that the vast majority of society work on a farm. Now with all these advances in technology, that have necessarily obseleted those previous jobs, people are free to pursue other tasks, knowing that if they work a couple hours a day they will at least have basic sustenance. Although it may be true that people _raise_ their standards of living, and thus keep on working just as hard (if not harder), this is a matter of personal choice. Because people are basically rational, we can reasonably assume that they are happier working hard.
Some people stop making stuff and start making other stuff? Complete jibberish. Anyways, I am under the impression that you have a romantic view of previous centuries. If so you have little appreciation for history or economics.
The only shred of legitimacy that your argument has is that if innovation happens TOO rapidly and people get displaced TOO fast, then we could potentially have problems. But we are in no danger of that today. In fact, on the aggregate, the gains in efficiency that we have made in the past decade pale in comparison to others. What little oil workers there are would be READILY absorbed into today's economy. The vast majority of the people unemployed in this country (very low percentage by historical standards) today are unemployable and/or simply don't wish to work; it's not the jobs don't exist for the taking. In other words, if you're willing and able (as these most of these oil workers would be), you can find a decent job.
He shouldn't have to. Anyone that has ever studied economics knows that, as a general rule, efficiency is the path to wealth. If we had followed your sentiments for the past 200 years most of us would still be working on farms from sunrise to sunset. [Not to mention unemployment, GDP, public health, and other such issues]. Hell, compare employment figures between countries that try to protect jobs like that and those that don't. You'll find that countries that protect jobs the most tend to have the highest unemployment and the lower GDP per capita.
Take this example (ignoring the environmental concerns and such). We reduce our energy costs by 20% using this fission method. Sure, some workers lose their jobs in the short run, but the job markets are tight and they would be absorbed. Consumers get cheaper energy, meaning that you have to work less to get the same amount of energy. Furthermore, industry is then allowed to produce cheaper goods and services because they no longer have to pay for this waste, which transfers back into consumers pockets. When people have more money to spend on other things, guess what? They spend more. Meaning that there is more demand for OTHER goods and services that people would RATHER have.
The reason that fission energy is used to heat gas or boil water, which in turn is used to spin turbines for making electicity, is that fission energy comes mostly from kinetic energy.
For example,
n + U235 --> Heavy1 + Heavy2 + 2.4n + 215MeV
where n are neutrons, Heavy1 and Heavy2 are two
split parts of the U235 (Uranium 235) atom,
and 215MeV is the energy released.
Something like 90% of that is in the motion of
Heavy1 Heavy2 and the neutrons (i.e., 180MeV of
kinetic energy.) The kinetic energy of
Heavy1 and Heavy2 is deposited very quickly
in the surrounding fuel as heat. The neutrons take a little longer to slow down, but no one
knows a way to directly convert the energy in
fast neutrons into electricity.
As someone else has pointed out, if you're
doing nuclear fusion in a plasma,
as in
Deuterium + Helium 3 --> Helium 4 + proton
you can convert the energy directly into
electricity, because the fusion products are charged.
"There's on the order of 1.0e30-1.0e31 joules of energy stored in the Earth's rotation. That gives us around 30 billion terawatt-years.
"I don't think we're in danger of draining it soon."
Check this shit out:
The planet used an estimated 415.6 Billion BTUs in 2000. This translates to 121.8 trillion kilowatt-hours, whick boils down to 121800 terawatt-hours, or 13.9 terawatt-years.
Now, mind you, global energy-consumption is increasing at around 2.2% per year (ibid). So, the first year we'd only lose 0.015 seconds. No big deal.
To see how this would all work out in the longer run, I wrote a little script.
After 100 years we'd only have to adjust our clocks 5 seconds slower every year. In the year 2360 the Earth's rotation would exactly match that of Mars, with a 24 hour, 36 minute day. By 2540 the calendar would only have 364.25 days in it, and just 30 years later another day is lost.
In 2693 we've lost December entirely, and days are 26.2 hours long. By 2773 things have kicked into serious gear and we're down to a year of 182 days that are each 48 hours long.
Assuming that in the interveining 800 years we find a way to overcome the logarithmic problem of sucking the energy at a constant rate from a slowing source, we can take out the last of the rotational power in the Earth by the year 2812.
Pretty early on people would have to rewrite timing code that was based on the assumption of a constant number of days in a year and seconds in a day. And geosynchronous satellites would have to have ion drives constantly pushing them gently away from the earth into higher and higher orbits to match the slowing rotation.
Of course, the biggest problem here is clearly that we can't use DirectTV after 2812 because the geosynchronous satellites can't stay in non-orbit.
Kevin Fox
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Kevin Fox
They don't have to be buried. Extract the plutonium and use it up in a reactor designed for it. Put the other stuff in the business end of a nuclear accelerator, or park it on the edge of a fission reactor, and make it break down sooner than by waiting for natural decay.
Or just bury the waste outside the U.S. Capitol building, where it's already more radioactive than outside a nuclear plant.
"Son, do you know why the lights went out? Oh, good, you found more billiard balls."
So what do you think of the idea of dropping trash into a plasma jet and running the whole mess through an industrial-sized mass spectrometer? Every so often you empty out the barrel of Carbon, the barrel of Iron, the little bucket of Plutonium...along with the one hundred other bins and pipes for all the other elements.
I suspect it may have been an attempt at humour, rather than a troll. If it was a troll though, I say he gets some points for spelling "Johannesburg" correctly (research) :)
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"The situation is SA appears to me to be precisely the situation that lead to the first generation of Nuclear Power being a failure. It will be a political statement signalling the rise of a regional superpower"
I don't think the developments on PBMR in South Africa are politically motivated but economically motivated (Eskom is a large now privatised company).
South Africa has also already had a successful nuclear power plant for decades now (Koeberg, in the Cape), so I can't understand that we have much of a statement to make. Very few people also seem to remember that South Africa also had a nuclear program and successfully built and detonated a nuclear bomb (way back in the 70's already IIRC; the nuclear program was eventually dismantled). So I highly doubt that this is an attempt to make any sort of political statement, I don't think South Africa has anything much "to prove" in terms of nuclear technologies (unlike for example countries like India which are experimenting now with nuclear weapons, their political situation is entirely different).
Our president might not be the sharpest around at science (his degree is economics) so quite frankly I (and most everyone else) wishes he would refrain from attempting to make strong scientific statements, its embarrassing. But the President has absolutely nothing to do with the PBMR program, and believe it or not we do have some very good scientists and engineers here.
I think you should consider doing a little more research into the political and social climate and history of South Africa before making your conclusions, as it seems to me that by and large you've just mentally mapped the US political situation onto South Africa, assumed it is more or less the same, and made your deductions from that.
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Here's an interesting link discussing this type of reactor.
In other words, instead of dying of cancer from living near an undetected uranium mine, I'd die from radiation poisoning. Okay, that's fair enough. But I'm still dead.
Perhaps I overstated my case. Perhaps you overstated your subject line?
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Much of the reason for the high cost of nuclear power is because of the safety mechanisms required by the public. The public does not trust nuclear power because its safety consists of multiplying an extremely small number (probability of meltdown) by an extremely large number (the consequences of a meltdown). The public prefers a known probability that coal miners be killed, that coal trains derail, that gas pipelines explode, and the radiation emitted by burning coal.
However, these new plants are much smaller (smaller danger from meltdown) and much obviously safer (e.g. no possibility of run-away), so they will produce a new level of trust in people.
Don't worry about disposal. The nuclear material exists in nature now and we manage to live with it. There's no reason why we can't put it back with a level of safety equal to background radiation.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Do we really want to cause the death of an industry for the sake of cheap electricity?
Yes, we do.
The millions of people who work in electricity plants, where nuclear reactors are used responsibly by the government, will beg to differ on that one.
A society that protects its workers at the expense of its consumers will forever be a poor society.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Most of the power in an H-bomb IS due to fusion
Wrong. Check out the Federation of American Scientists, who have a remarkably accurate FAQ on the matter. Check out this link for details.
Or, for those who are goatse.cx averse, I'll just reprint a snippet of the FAQ here: The 5 Mt Redwing Tewa test (20 July 1956 GMT, Bikini Atoll) had a fission fraction of 85%.
The next claim of yours--namely, "It is naive of anyone to believe that nuclear weapons design is common knowledge"--is just as absurd. The principles behind nuclear-weapons design are straightforward and are taught in college classrooms to undergraduates. In the height of the cold war, nuclear-weapons design was published in the open literature. One physicist might write a paper detailing the particular physical properties of compounds exposed to extremely high radiation flux and whatnot, comparable to those found in the heart of a star--a perfectly acceptable scientific article, but when you say "heart of a star" I hear "in a nuclear weapon undergoing supercriticality".
The Manhattan Project was chaired by General Leslie Groves of the Army Air Corps/USAF, but all the principals involved were scientists. Have you ever tried to get a scientist to keep something a secret? They can't. They're genetically incapable of secrecy. It's right there in their DNA sequence, somewhere in that giant double-helix, that says, "if it's cool and it furthers our understanding of the cosmos, I've GOT to tell people about it!"
As far back as the early 1980s, the magazine The Progressive was sued by the United States Government to prevent them from publishing extremely detailed specifications and schematics of nuclear weapons. The DOE only withdrew the lawsuit after it became clear that to get an injunction against The Progressive, they'd have to declassify even more documents and put even more weapons-design material into the public record.
In the Manhattan Project days, it was VERY difficult to obtain large amount (mere pounds) of weapons grade U-235 and plutonium.
No it wasn't. Uranium is a very common element. You can refine it out of granite, for crying out loud. The difficulty has never been in getting fast-fissile material; the difficulty has been in separating it out. Yes, centrifuging it all out is tremendously power-intensive, but if you want the bang, you gotta pay the buck.
The main reason most nations cannot produce nuclear weapons (specifically hydrogen-based nuclear weapons) is because they don't know how to arrange the materials
Nope. The engineering behind it is well-known. The difficulty comes in getting refined fissile material--world governments keep an excruciatingly close eye on stockpiles of refined fissile material (save in the former USSR, which is why it's a source of such concern to arms-proliferation wonks), and building facilities to refine raw material into enriched fissile material is considered extremely destabilizing to regional peace, and as such, is strongly discouraged.
Wrong.
Like Bungie says, "Sorry don't make it so". Neither does "wrong".
Yes, U-238 is quite common, but U-235 is NOT
Sure it is. It's about 0.1%, or thereabouts, as a percentage of the total mass fraction. If you've got a kilo of uranium, you've got a gram of U235 in there. Where's your problem? The difficulty is in refining, not procuring.
And what are you calling "fast-fissile material"?
Material which can undergo explosive fission easily.
If the US did not want someone to release scientific material, do you really think that they would sue them?
The Magic 8-Ball of History says... "Clearly, Yes". Ever heard of The Pentagon Papers? Ever heard of the New York Times? Ever heard of a couple of journalists named Woodward and Bernstein? All of these people and agencies came under withering governmental pressure to not publish information deemed harmful to the national security. The courts have historically been extremely hard to convince that national security overrides the First Amendment.
In matters of national security, the people would be arrested or worse...
Paranoid ranting from someone who's losing the arguments on merits, so he's turning this into an "if YOU only knew what I knew, YOU'D agree with me, too!". Sorry. I outgrew that mode of debate when I was in fifth grade.
When you are citing "proof" of your arguments, you should not use biased sources, or if you do, you should include a source from each side of the argument. The American Federation of American (Atomic) Scientists is a non-profit organization devoted to ENDING the arms race and is AGAINST nuclear weapons.
Just because they have a mission in life doesn't mean they're lying. I know a senior officer in the USAF who's in command of a missile silo. Let me tell you, nobody on Earth hates nukes as much as he does. If you think that ending the arms race makes FAS partial, then all I can imagine is that you don't want the arms race ended.
Buddy, everybody who's involved with nukes wants the arms race to end. Even Pat Buchanan wants the arms race to end. The only difference of opinion is how the arms race ought to end--by one side making a moral stand and unilaterally disarming, or both sides negotiating a mutual disarmament.
FAS wants the arms race stopped. So does SAC and NORAD and Dubya and Clinton and all of Congress. If you want me to find a source from a party that wants the arms race to go on, I'm sorry, there aren't any reliable sources out there.
All the people who want the arms race to go on are absofuckinglutely nuts, and the entire world knows it.
I used to believe this too. Of course, like many things, the truth is a little more complicated. When I tried this line on a physicist friend of mine (who used to work for the AECL), she sat me down and smacked me around. :)
While the heavy water moderator is required to initiate the reaction (the rods are initially less than critical mass), once started, the rods end up enriching themselves, and may be able to sustain a reaction on their own.
Also, even if the reaction stops, the rods may generate enough heat to melt anyways. This is because a good fraction of the heat generated in the plant is by the decay of fission products. You can't stop the decay no matter what you do.
Of course, this is probably incredibly unlikely. But that just means you have to roll the dice more often. :)
Cool eh?
Jason Pollockgreat. So now you have diluted radioactive elements. Which would be great appart from the fact that in order to be viable as a storage option, you'd have to dump alot of stuff into the volcano. When it erupts, the resulting radioactive magma (was that a joke I didn't get?) lands ontop of everything.
great! so now the whole region is covered in radioactive rocks. This has helped the situation how?
I'd been given the impression that one of the main reasons that reprocessing was abandoned was that the process could be used in the creation of isotopes suitable for nuclear weapons. As I recall, in the 70's we signed some treaties basically renouncing the process and creating an international ban on the process in the name of nuclear non-proliferation. I'd never heard that saftey was the main reason that it was dropped, but rather international politics. Not sure how recent the info was, though. . . Anybody got a more recent answer on why the US has pulled back from reporssesing, or is it really just the saftey issue?
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Aren't there some serious problems with leakage of these containers into the groundwater table? I seem to remember hearing something akin to that...
I'm obviously no physics guy (otherwise I most likely wouldn't be asking this question), but couldn't spend fuel be dumped in an active volcano where it would melt down in liquid-hot mag-ma (sorry, had to say it) and diffuse the radioactivity?
just my blog and pix
Uranium is a by product of gold mining in South Africa and the price of gold has been lagging for some time now. The Forbes 500 companies with the highest growth in profits are the oil companies (reported last week) and venture capital for energy grew an average of 115%/year from 1995 thru 2000 it only makes sense for Dutch Boers to team up with the internationally respected black African politicians of South Africa to overcome the barriers, both technical and political, between their mining infrastructure and the already growing world market for uranium.
Seastead this.
Hmmm ... what you are describing sounds more like a U-bomb than an H-bomb. Doing this from memory:
...)
U-bombs were tested in the late 60s. Basically, the idea was to wrap a H-bomb with uranium. The A-bomb trigger would go off initiating an H-bomb explosion which in turn would induce fission in the outer uranium layer for an increased yield. It was a very messy weapon and didn't have a whole lot of strategic value as such. I think the one test killed a bunch of fisherman in a Japanese boat called the "Lucky Dragon" (I forget the original Japanese name) from fallout who were trolling a bit too close to the test site. However this might be more than a little bit mixed up.
It has been a while since I've thought about the history of above-grounds weapons testing and if you are relying on Slashdot for a nuclear physics education you are just plain silly. As a Ph.D. in plasma physics, it is distressing to see the number of scientific dubious assertions that get moderated up (it is as though science here is decided through committee and not experiment).
In any case, because there are many variants of atomic weapons means I don't have a great deal of faith in the previous poster. Depending on the details of the trigger and fusion fuel you can get all sorts of weapons (optimized for explosive yield, optimized for EMP, optimized for neutron yield, optimized for fallout or lack thereof,
A blanket statement that all fusion bombs are fission powered is a bit misleading.
Furthermore, if I recall correctly nuclear proliferation treaties were entered into which effectively arrested development of U-bomb type weapons. Your level of cynicism will dictate whether that means anything to you.
Kevin
"the same explosive fuel that downed the hindenburg"
The Hindenburg was not downed by the Hydrogen. The Hindenburg went down because the the fabric "skin" over the metal frame had been painted with a mixture containing powerdered aluminum. It was the first time a blimp had been painted with the substance, and before that the extreme flammability of the stuff was unknown. When the ship dropped its mooring lines, a sparc from the static it picked up from storm clouds arced somewhere on blimp, and the aluminum in the paint caught fire. It burned at several thousand degrees, and the entire skin of the blimp went with it. The heat collapsed the frame, and blew up the hydrogen tanks inside.
The whole thing was discovered by the Germans soon after the explosion, who covered it up fearing that shifting blame from helium to the aluminum paint would make Nazi scientists look bad. It was later discovered by a NASA hydrogen expert who saw that the giant flames and burning skin were inconsistent with hydrogen explosions. He found remnants of the blimp's skin and tests confirmed his theory.
Just a little eye opener...
I agree. To speak with athority on power generation you should get a degree in Nuclear Engineering, work in a plant, and know what you are talking about.
The only reason Chernobyl went up and Three Mile Island did not is luck. Both reactors were designed using inadequate computing power. Chernobyl went critical because there was a region of positive feedback in the operation cycle that was not uncovered using the two dimensional simulation techniques used in both the USSR and the US at the time.
BzzzT! Wrong, this had nothing to do with inadequate computer simulations. US reactors, at least, were tested out with models, then prototypes and pilot stations. These are the kinds of things men have been using instead of computers for all of human history but the last 40 years or so.
Both accidents were caused by operators overcoming automated saftey features. At Chernobyl, the operators were testing safety features at low reactor power levels and outside electricity turned off. They were not supposed to do that. At TMI, operators failed to believe their insturments and turned off systems that would have shut the plant down safely. There the similarities end.
Chernobyl suffered a steam explosion and uncotrolled release because of poor design goals. It was a dual purpose reactor providing both electricity and plutonium. The core was water cooled and graphite moderated, the graphite serving to promote plutonium ingrowth. It was also an easy access reactor, with nothing between it and the world but heavy concrete blocks. When the operators got everything just wrong and core power jumped from 0 to 1000% in a thousanth of a second or so, they were doomed. The heat released immediatly precluded control rod insertion, leaving the core overpowered and uncontrollable. It then got hot enough to make a steam and hydrogen explosion that blew those concrete blocks off with such force that they destroyed the refueling crane above. Without further barriers to release, the contents of the core were free to kill operators and make a mess for miles around. Nasty, but it won't happen at a US plant because we don't have easy access reactors. We have contained reactors desinged only to make power.
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While the attempted environmental extortion is admirable, the world will not reward people like this. Reality is that Joe San-Diego did not want a powerplant in his back yard yesterday. Today, he has to pay an absorbident amount for an artificially limited commodity.
Poor Joe. He's going to suffer rolling blackouts and all that. Burgalars will rob him while his alarm is off. His food will rot when the fridge is turned off. His house will mold and mildew while his AC is off, his air indoors will be worse than that outside and his health will suffer. His children will get asthma and he'll have to pay for expensive medicine and hospital trips. His trafic lights will be unreliable and his car rides will take longer and be more dangerous. One day, after an automobile accident at a broken traffic light, his hospital might loose power and all the OR gadgets will sputter and fail.
Oh well, that's too bad for Joe.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Chernobyl was operated at high power levels (normal operation) and then shut down for about eight hours while engineers mucked with the console, then brought back up to critical condition. The basic problem is that nuclear reactors are not like cars. When you shut 'em off, they don't just lie dormant until you switch them back on again.
When you operate a reactor, one of the fission products decays (half-life eight hours) into Xe-135, which absorbs neutrons strongly. That has the same effect as inserting a bit of control rod into the reactor, and as the reactor comes up to equilibrium levels of Xe, you have to pull out bits of actual control rod in order to compensate. The equilibrium level of Xe 135 in the core is determined by the balance between production (which depends on your average power level over the last eight hours) and destruction (which depends on your power level now) of the Xe.
When you turn off the reactor, you stop destroying the Xenon. It builds up in the reactor core, effectively shutting down the reactor by greater and greater margin until, about eight hours later, it reaches a peak level and begins to decay again.
The operators on the day of the accident found that they had to pull large amounts of extra rod out of the reactor core (because of the Xe-135, though they didn't pause to think about it). When they brought the reactor critical, the Xe-135 was quickly destroyed by the neutrons in the core, removing the extra damping effect and making the reaction run away.
Even then, "SCRAM trips" (emergency shutoff safeguards) in the console would have saved the day except that they had almost all been disabled to test a single particular one.
The real problem with nuclear power isn't the "normal" waste disposal problem. It's the incredible, abject, deep stupidity of the bottom 1% of nuclear plant workers. You can engineer around physics, toxicity, and radiation -- but you can't engineer around foolish people. I was finally convinced of this truism by the insanely stupid people in Japan, who made their own critical assembly out of dissolved uranium (by doubling the uranium batch size for faster processing) -- other examples may be found in the nuclear plant lore here in the U.S.
Surprisingly, dams are not clean energy sources. Many of them produce a large amount of carbon dioxide http://www.newscientist.com/nl/0603/stink.html, so they wouldn't help with global warming.
I'm thinking depleted-uranium SUVs -- how else are we going to make them heavy enough in the future?
Be the first on your block with a new Ford Excrescent!
Shut up, be happy. The conveniences you demanded are now mandatory. -- Jello Biafra
where do you think the carbon dioxyde we exhale comes from?
From our lungs, not our stomachs. (You said exhale, not belch.)
OTOH, flatulent cows are actually a significant source of methane, another greenhouse gas...
--
And big box stores wiped out mom'n'pop stores, themselves wiped out by internet stores, now, can I interest you in some stock in a nice internet business?
/. terms, it means that MS software is much better than anything else. Flamebait? No. For the general office worker, it may be a good thing for MS to take over everything. But we can think of many situations where the loss of software craftsmanship is a bad, bad thing.
/.ers are squeezed middle income, rich as long as we have our high-paid software jobs, just a few paychecks out of living out of individual transportation modules.
Economics becomes paradoxically inefficient as markets mature, because the profit incentive becomes the entire driving force. So why do anything when you can get pure profit?
My stepdad had a toy and hobby store. It got wiped out by toys r us. Now the big box stores and chains are having big time problems - is it playco I just saw having a liquidation sale? How about etoys.com? The net result is much fewer hobby shops, with the loss of artisan advice giving. Remember when you were little and built things? Now everything is just manufactured and toys magically appear - even build-it toys are leaving less to the imagination - check out a lego set lately? So the inefficiency that economics doesn't address is that of good workmanship - there is a strong incentive away from it, in fact. Of course, in many circumstances, mass production is a good thing - even Ferrari has come into the 20th century for making engine parts. But there needs to be a balance of craftsmanship, and that is what is lost. In
And the other thing placing too much faith in market economics is, you wind up with a bifurcated economy - the rich get richer, the poor have children. Most of us
Oracle and unix guy.
When an element goes through a nuclear reaction, it becomes a different element. So it isn't like your putting the same stuff back down there.
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The sun isn't going to bake water into hydogen and oxygen, it's going to turn it into water vapor. And attomic power dosn't come from the sun at all
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Uh, no...
Dude, have you not got any of what these people have been saying?
In small douses, radiation doesn't hurt you. In large doses it does. The byproducts of nuclear reaction are far more radioactive (a million times as much so, according to one poster) then the normal uranium you'd find in the ground. Touching the two ends of a dead battery is in no way comparable to getting hit by lightning. It's the same with this
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The material is already 'critical' otherwise they wouldn't even work. This was clearly stated in the article, so I can only conclude you didn't read it at all.
Anyway, all that would happen if some guy tried to 'open it up' is that he would severely burn himself, and spill really hot beads all over the place, it wouldn't cause Hiroshima style explosion. And you would need to use dynamite in order to get the case open (or some similar explosive)
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"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
No, that's not my pic that's just a link to the main site (the slashdot sig cuts me off). The URLs keep changing on p-r.c, but the actual JPG of me is here
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"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
>Imagine the fun when a curious six-year-old takes Daddy's screwdriver and tries to see how the
>basement fission plant works.
Troll.
As opposed to the fun when the 6 year old tries to take the microwave, the gas boiler and the television apart? 120 volts and/or gas is not going to teach more than a final lesson. The modern world is not noted for the child-benign nature when you take it apart.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"I've always wondered what is stopping us from building a scaled-down version of a nuclear bomb.
As a matter of fact, they have been made pretty darn small. Check this link.
Highlight:
"The W54 warhead used in the Davy Crockett had a minimum mass of about 23 kg, and had yields ranging from 10 tons up to 1 kt in various mods (probably achieved by varying the fissile content). The warhead was basically egg-shaped with the minor axis of 27.3 cm and a major axis of 40 cm. The W-54 probably represents a near minimum diameter for a spherical implosion device (the U.S. has conducted tests of a 25.4 cm implosion system however)."
10 tons of yield is pretty small for a nuke. And I can't find the link now, but I have read other reports that state the theoretical minimum diameter for a "linear compression" nuke is about 4". Those atomic rocket launchers in Starship Troopers? Not so crazy, apparently.
"General Atomics?" It sounds like something out of an old Asimov or Niven story. I gotta have a T-shirt. Didn't see any for sale on the web site... is there a way to get GA swag?
or maybe the server's dedicated fission reactor just melt down..
--
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Not only will we be able to get power so cheap that we can kiss rolling blackouts produced by centralized power generation goodbye, but we can also worry about what happens when someone want's to "reverse engineer" the thing by opening up the box and "checking out" the hardware, in the name of information being free. Man, I sure wouldn't want to be living within 100 miles of someone who thinks it wise to tinker with a small nuclear reactor.
And think about the chain reaction that would be caused by one "going off." If anyone else in the area had one, the resulting EMP would probably fry the control electronics and cause other devices to go "critical," thereby setting them off too. What a blast that would be (no pun intended).
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BEFORE USE:
1. Remove cranium from anal cavity
2. Take a physics course or two
U-238 is fissionable. It is not fissile, so it is not used for fuel in reactors, except to be bred into Pu-239. Neutrons at the energies produced by fission reactions cannot induce fission in U-238. At that energy, neutrons either don't interact at all, or are captured, leading to beta decay. Neutrons from fusion do have enough energy to induce fission, though. When you look at the reactions, you see that a few grams of deuterium-tritium mixture can produce enough high-energy neutrons to induce fission in several hundred grams of U-238. I can't comment on the exact numbers (not a nuclear engineer), but the given figures definitely fit in order-of-magnitude estimates.
This is why H-bomb schematics always show a cylinder of U-238, with a rod of U-238 down the middle, and the intervening space full of deuterium and tritium, with a complete fission bomb at one end. I think there's usually a beryllium casing outside the uranium cylinder, but I'm not positive.
It is possible to create a bomb which derives almost all its energy from fusion, but such weapons are heavy and large for their yield. They have almost the same design as described above, but the U-238 jacket is replaced with tungsten or lead. One mostly-fusion device, the Tsar Bomba, derived 97% of its yield from fusion. It was intended, however, to have a U-238 jacket, to produce an even higher yield.
Most of this info was taken from the Nuclear Weapons FAQ, section 1.5. Here's one link, I'm sure Google can find more if you want.
Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!
I thought "green" meant getting power from crystals or butterflies or some shit.
green means different things to different people. To me it means first that the cost of every product should reflect not only how much money it took the producer to produce it, but also the cost of cleaning up the mess that third parties are left with as a result of both its consumption and its production. Second, green means that we should not party at the expense of our grandchildren. Taken together, what I want to say simply is that green means fair. But then again, I am a green-red colorblind.
-- look, cheese ahoy!
The idiot in the Whitehouse is certainly not someone I would trust to ensure that safety standards were enforced.
From the reasons you mentionned and the way the two parties have positioned themselves in the last two decades, I suspect that reviving nuclear power in the US is something that no Republican president can pull off. It would just cause too much fallout ( political, not nuclear). Only a Democrat running on a green message will carry enough trust to overcome the fears of the public.
PS. The Idiot is a diversion, mind the crooks in the background.
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Overall, the political, technical and economic feasibility of disposal of all types of waste and of decommissioning plants has yet to be proven anywhere in the world. A responsible policy would appear to be to carry out investigations into these processes so that there is confidence that when these processes are required, they are technically proven and the resources to carry them out are available.
Waste is the deal breaker. I am sure that it is possible to find a feasible solution to this problem. But it will require heavy governmental subsidy from countries richer than South Africa. It will take time, and it probably won't be cost efficient unless the cost of dirty electricity factors in the whole gamut of environmental externalities including global warming.
Next month Dick "The Nanny" Cheney will come out with recommendations for a new US energy policy, that will probably include nuclear power. This could be a good opportunity to put funds into waste disposal research that could turn results in a decade. My suspicion, however, is that this is not what we are going to see. The proposal will most likely suggest building reactors here and now, and giving subsidies to energy utilities that will be used mostly to disburse dividends. Given the likelihood that the plan will generate extreme political outrage, I strongly suspect that its real purpose is to draw fire, paint environamentalists as extremists, and finally "compromise" on good old coal and gas subsidies. What a pity! But then, I may be wrong -- we will know that next month.
-- look, cheese ahoy!
A previous poster noted that France has not had a nuclear problem. The reason behind this is quite simple: standardization.
Several decades ago, France was searching for power sources. Lacking local natural resources needed to power conventional plants, they considered nuclear power to be their best bet.
Unlike most of the rest of the world, France realized that safety came from using standarized equipment. They came up with an initial reactor design, and stayed with it. Everyone working on nuclear plants in France is trained on the same equipment; countless engineers could easily transfer from one plant to another without missing a beat.
This is not the case in many other countries. Most of the world's reactors outside of France all have their own custom designs, largely in part to utilize later discoveries. Should someone design a home reactor, the fact that it is a well analyzed design should bring some comfort (hopefully with interlocks!). Nuclear technology has gotten a lot safer; but the early accidents have scared the public away, possibly forever.
Hydrogen was not what downed the Hindenburg. This is a popular misconception. The real problem was that the damn thing had a reflective coating of powdered aluminum, so that the hydrogen wouldn't get too warm from sunlight or something... esentially, it was coated with Thermite! All it took was one spark, and POOF!
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Nope, it's the neutrons. There's a lot of energy output too -- thought not as much as you might think; the fusion reaction is actually a little less energetic than the fission reaction, but it scales in ways the fission reaction can't. And it makes all those damn neutrons, which aren't really what you want, but send them into a block of U238 and you get a very, very, very large boom for your buck.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
My figure comes from an interview with Ted Taylor in a photographic essay book At Work in the Fields of the Bomb which I can't seem to find right now so I can't tell you who the author was. Since Ted Taylor built the thing, I tend to think of that as a firmer figure than anything quoted in the linked site.
It is entirely believable that the DC was scaleable, as an adjustment in the boosting would have the effect of radically changing the yield. Taylor was somewhat reticent in the interview (he was close-mouthed, for example, about the concept of levitation which is revealed in full in Richard Rhodes' Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb). So there may have been this extra capability he couldn't reveal because of his security clearance, but the 500 ton figure is in the midrange of the "variable yield" figure.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Bombs like this need to be very heavily boosted with Tritium, which is both expensive and has a short half-life so they require relatively frequent maintenance. IIRC a guy named Ted Taylor is responsible for designing a lot of these "miniaturized" designs. They are an offshoot of the H-bomb/ICBM programs, and rely on some of the same technology as H-bombs.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Yes, it would. It would be another animal entirely, though; the neutrons created by the fusion reaction have to do something. So when you replace the tamper in an H-bomb with something that won't fission, you get what is called a neutron bomb.
I'm sure you've heard of them.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
No it isn't. It's approximately 10% fission trigger, 10% fusion reaction, 80% induced fission in otherwise unfissionable depleted uranium thanks to the neutrons from the fusion. This is one of the most important lies that was exposed by Howard Morland when he exposed the "secret" of the H-bomb in The Progressive.
In fact, because of the way its major fission reaction is triggered the H-bomb is dirtier than an "equivalent" mass of A-bombs. The fallout is more complex, the isotopes are more exotic, and it is just plain something you don't want to be around when it goes off. Or 1,000 miles downwind from, either.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Evacuating Philadelphia is probably possible in a short time, Manhattan is next to impossible. The idea of building any plant of that type next to the tri-state area is pretty whacky.
The Chernobyl fallout pretty much trashed cities 200 miles away. The real issue is the way the wind happens to be blowing at the time.
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Only Nixon could go to China
I agree, I think that the only way that Nuclear power can be revived in any form is under a President who is not so openly disdainful of science and environmentalists.
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There was more than one factor. However the comfortable myth that the explosion was caused by operator error is just that - a self serving myth. The operator's actions caused the meltdown however those actions were within the operating proceedures of the plant.
The cause of the explosion was that the reactor had an unknown region of positive feedback. That in turn was due to the simulations of the reactor being pretty rudimentary. At the time the standard approach was to simulate in 2D and then extrapolate using experimental data to 3D.
It's the incredible, abject, deep stupidity of the bottom 1% of nuclear plant workers.
Placing the blame on the shift crew is a good way to pretend that the problems could not occur in the US. That is why the US and British nuclear lobbies were pushing the 'operator error' theory long before there was any evidence that might support it.
I was finally convinced of this truism by the insanely stupid people in Japan, who made their own critical assembly out of dissolved uranium (by doubling the uranium batch size for faster processing)
The Japanese event was caused by management who ordered the workers to mix the stuff by hand in buckets rather than use the expensive machinery installed for that exact purpose. It was the plant management that decided that using the machinery took too long.
It appears that it was the workers who had the bright idea of mixing the stuff in double quantities.
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You remember doing 3D simulations? Or you remember being fed the propaganda?
Most reactors in use today were designed in the 60s or late 70s. The computing power to do 3D simulations simply did not exist, either in the USSR or the US.
All accidents look ridiculous after the fact.
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Actually the pebble reactors don't need very much in the way of enrichment, one of the main attractions of the design sice the less energy required for enrichment the better off you are.
The idea of Mr Fission is plain silly, the main obstacle preventing whackos making atom bombs is the difficulty of finding the fissile material.
Depleted Uranium on the other hand is pretty damn usefull stuff. It is a heavy metal and is pretty much as bad to mess about with as mercury. It is a solid at room temperature but thin chips of it will spontaneously combust in air. Oh and there is usually quite a bit of residual radiation but not so much that folk need to get paranoid.
There is a hefty chunk of depleted uranium in the nose of every 747. It is used for ballast to trim the aircraft.
I am currently working on a Battlebot with an outer shell of depleted uranium. I checked in the rules and it is not prohibited. Completely pointless (DU is pretty soft) but should psyche out some of the competition. Alternatively maybe we could go for carborundum or perhaps synthetic saphire like my watch has.
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I doubt that big oil is too unhappy with the contribution from Mr Nader. I think that the Anwar oil field should be named after him.
While most politicians are slaves to the contributors most do actually take some time to come up with a policy that is marginally defensible. Bush appears to believe that all scientific evidence of harmful environmental effects is produced by liberal crypto-communists who are members of a giant conspiracy against capitalism.
I don't think that even US politicians would knowingly permit an unsafe nuclear plant to be built. Bush has made it plain that he only wants to hear scientific advice that supports his policies.
That is exactly the type of politics that rightly got nuclear power derailed in the first place. The Canadians built safe designs. But both the US and the USSR built unsafe designs. Challenging the nuclear establishment in either country meant the end of your career. They even destroyed Oppenheimer.
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And your expertise that qualifies you to make such a statement is?
I have a degree in Nuclear Physics. Any light water or Advanced Gas Cooled Reactor is essentially a bomb waiting to go off that the operator hopes to keep just under the critical point.
As for 'modern', go have a look at a real nuclear station. Most of the technology is out of the 1960s or earlier. There hasn't been a new station started since three mile island.
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Well perhaps you don't know but lots of US researchers including MIT have been working on pebble bed.
The magazine article is pretty far off base. I was not commenting on it because I didn't think it merited it. Fissile Uranium is the most highly controlled mineral arround. The idea that folk are suddenly going to be able to buy it by the sack full in Home Depot is plain stupid. Pebble bed reactors are certainly cheaper than light water but they are nowhere near as small and simple as the article makes out.
The other piece of data that had been raised in the discussion but you appear to be ignorant of is that Bush has been advocating building nuclear plants.
Only thing is that Bush is not pushing for the intrinsically safe designs. He wants to build more light water stations.
I am not particularly keen on SA building nuclear stations either. Their government is also headed by a scientific ignoramous who has convinced himself that HIV does not cause AIDS after listening to a discredited quack [apparently there is also a dose of wishful thinking since the President would prefer not to pay for AIDS drugs even at the low prices the sucessful patent suit make possible]. On top of that, the super powers built intrinsically faulty designs because Nuclear Power became part of what we nuclear physicists call a dick size contest. The US built nuclear stations to show it could tame the destructive force of the atom, the design and construction schedules were dictated by propaganda needs. The USSR naturally had to follow suit and built even faster and with even more carelessness.
The situation is SA appears to me to be precisely the situation that lead to the first generation of Nuclear Power being a failure. It will be a political statement signalling the rise of a regional superpower.
The economics of the design almost certainly depend on selling copies of the design in the West. To assert that the US has no influence is to miss the point. The US will likely fund the scheme before it is finished.
There are governments that might be capable of handling nuclear power responsibly. If the Blair government said new nuclear power was necessary that would be pretty credible. However given that their exisiting nuclear capacity costs three times as much to run as the coal fired and the fact that the UK has 400 years of coal reserves the chance of the UK being forced to go nuclear is vanishingly small.
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The sad fact of nuclear power is that it is probably possible to do the job safely but it is easier to say that safety is number one priority than to make it number one priority.
Unfortunately there are many with the attitude that everyone who thinks there might be a problem with Nuclear power must be a tree hugger. If the people making the decisions and regulating Nuclear Power have that attitude we are likely to have a repeat of the 1960s - plants built in locations they should never have been using recycled military designs that were completely inapropriate.
The folk telling the President to build nuclear stations are probably the same ones who are claiming that Nuclear Missile Defense is viable.
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How do you know that nuclear power is efficient? The thing that you have neglected to mention is that, right now, there is no long-term solution to the nuclear waste problem. The only reason that nuclear power is a viable choice today is that the cost of disposal has not been factored in. Some of the isotopes have half lifes on the order of 10^6 years...
This is great! Not only do you get power for your house, but as a by-product, you can use the waste heat to heat your pool, and the Cerenkov radiation will light it at night!
Err.. How did you work this one out? It makes no sense at all.
How can any single nuclear reaction (by which I mean just one fission or fusion) _EVER_ release over a _kilojoule_ of energy? I think you have make a mistake between KeV (kiloelectronvolts) and KJ (kilojoules)... There's a seriously big difference!
Be nice to people on the way up. You will meet them again on your way down!
I see a number of technologies in development that could easily give pebble beds a run for their money. The waste products of nuclear reactions, and massive strides in technology neccesary to make them more feasible on a large scale make fission a somewhat unremarkable, and unlikely choice for the powerplant of the future.
A number of power companies and research groups, under a Department of Energy initiative, are testing Solar Two -- the world's most technically advanced solar energy power plant -- in the California desert. It works like this: A 300-foot-high central receiver captures energy reflected by more than 1,900 surrounding mirrors and uses it to heat molten salt, which is, in turn, stored until it is needed to generate electricity. Solar Two, which was connected to California's grid in 1996, can itself power 10,000 homes, and alarger-scale commercial plant based on it could handle as many as 200,000.
Southern California Edison is already testing microturbines: small, clean-burning natural-gas power plants that cost a relatively inexpensive $25,000 to $200,000 to build, depending on size. Microturbines could be plopped in the middle of a city to serve a few thousand customers in the immediate area.
In whales, waves are being used to generate power for a small town. The generators are little more than small turbines and cement tubes, and were built at a very low cost.
In comparison to all of these already implemented technologies, pebble beds, which have been batted around and dismissed since the 80s, don't seem like reasonable options.
My Karma is so good, I'm the Dalai Lama...or something.
As you admit, water, solar and tidal (plus geothermal which you omit) are all partially viable. Why not diversify? Say, 10%-15% for each of the 4 (I know for a fact solar could easily handle that much, I'm not as familiar with the other 3). That brings us up to 40%-60%. Then let nuclear do the rest reducing as the other four get more efficient (or when fusion starts working).
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324006
Spent fuel is not the only problem. The reactor casing and shielding become radioactive as a result of exposure to neutron bombardment. Not as bad as the fuel, but not the sort of thing you'd want in the county dump, either.
Incidentally, except in some exotic cases, this is also a problem for controlled fusion reactions, which generate a lot of energetic neutrons.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Of the 103 operating nuclear power plants in the US, 2 are in California. There used to be 3, but Rancho Seco was shut down in 1989, and hasn't put out a single kilowatt-hour of electricity since. So, no, not all of your nuclear power plants are on-line. Have a nice day.
Notice I said "strip mining." A pound of uranium will last years, while a pound of oil, coal, natural gas, etc. may last you a half-hour, depending on what you do with it. One or two mines in the entire US would provide all the fuel we'd need. And they'd be small/slow enough to to be way more environment-friendly than your average coal mine.
"Most people freak at the thought of meltdowns and at the radioactive waste produced. We're already used to accepting the smog produced by Coal & oil plants, but radioactive disasters seem so utterly scary to the States, possibly as a result of years of Global Thermo Nuclear War fear?"
Nah, the big problem are the people (*cough* Californians *cough*) that want NO new power plants, no matter how the electricity is produced. :)
The worst nuclear accident in the US was an almost-meltdown at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, PA, and that was how many decades ago? Compare that to the various natural gas explosions that occur around the country. Boiling liquid-vapor explosion, anyone?
What was the worst accident in France, where they get 80%+ of their electricity from fission? And they're in the forefront of technology in civillian fission (though they're lagging behind the US in nuclear propulsion, as with the rest of the world).
Whatever you have to say about the spent uranium from the plants, it is still the most environmentally friendly power generation around. Not only are there no emissions involved by defintion, but there's also no off-shore drilling, no tanker spills, no strip mining, no pipelines, no explosive railray cars, no high-pressure vessels (aside from the boilers themselves)... hell, even windmills and solar arrays require lots of open land, often at the cost of the native animal and plant life.
"but it will not be solve the thrird world and california's energy problems."
Actually, California's power problems would be solved by re-activating the nuclear plants that California environmental lobbies have shut down. As the lights flicker and diesel backup generators kick in, there are perfectly good nuclear plants just waiting to be used out there.
"Fission power is what fuels the hydrogen bomb"
No. Fusion is what fuels the hydrogen bomb. While it is true that, right now, the only known way to get an exothermic fusion reaction is with the heat and energy created by fission, fission is not a requirement for fusion. Look at the sun.
"we are proposing that we put fission reactors in everyone's home? "
Just because you have a little radioacive isotopes in your home doesn't mean that it's the right kind of isotope (or even element) to make a bomb, that there's enough to make a bomb, or that you will be able to use it make the isotopes to make a bomb.
And consider how many homes in the northeast have 1000's of gallons of heating oil (and the explosive fumes involved) underneath their yards.
"possibly by doping it with Iron, which can cause nuclear meltdown if done correctly, because Fe- + H "
I could be wrong, but you still seem to be confusing fission with fusion. No hydrogen involved in fission. At best, you might claim that there's "hydrogen" involved, but that's only because that's what emitted alpha particles are (technically speaking).
Meltdowns only happen if your core is large enough to get hot enough to melt the fuel (and just about anything else), and your cooling system and your control system fails. This is generally only applicable to large-scale/naval power plants, because they have (relatively) large amounts of fuel.. If I have a fission reactor in my back yard about the size of my air conditioning unit, I'd have to be pretty damned talented to get it to melt down.
"Also, there are social implications - unemployment and the death of an industry. Do we really want to cause the death of an industry for the sake of cheap electricity? "
If the alternative is people freezing in the middle of winter, or dying of heat stroke in the summer because they can't afford their power bills, then HELL YES!
"where nuclear reactors are used responsibly by the government, will beg to differ on that one. "
Actually, this would be a boom to the nuclear power industry. Imagine if nuclear reactors were as numerous as air conditioners.
As for other power generation, they'll need new jobs. Just like what happened to the ice deliverymen when the refrigerator was developed. And all those whalers that lost their jobs when people switched to fossil fuels and electric lights. If bettering society as a whole means a few people lose their jobs, so be it. Majority rules.
"We must not embrace new technologies solely because they are new, but rather because they improve our quality of life."
You don't think that having to pay a power bill isn't an improvement in the quality of life? Do you work for SoCalEd or something?
"or that you will be able to use it make the isotopes to make a bomb."
I meant "or you'll be able to use the reacter as a breeder to make weapons-grade isotopes."
"At best, you might claim that there's "hydrogen" involved, but that's only because that's what emitted alpha particles are (technically speaking). "
I typed "hydrogen," but I was really thinking "helium." H... He... what's the difference? A proton? :)
The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where hydrogen is built into helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees
Yo ho, it's hot, the sun is not
A place where we could live
But here on Earth there'd be no life
Without the light it gives
We need its light
We need its heat
We need its energy
Without the sun, without a doubt
There'd be no you and me
The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where hydrogen is built into helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees
The sun is hot
It is so hot that everything on it is a gas: iron, copper, aluminum, and many others.
The sun is large
If the sun were hollow, a million Earths could fit inside. And yet, the sun is only a middle-sized star.
The sun is far away
About 93 million miles away, and that's why it looks so small.
And even when it's out of sight
The sun shines night and day
The sun gives heat
The sun gives light
The sunlight that we see
The sunlight comes from our own sun's
Atomic energy
Scientists have found that the sun is a huge atom-smashing machine. The heat and light of the sun come from the nuclear reactions of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and helium.*
The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where hydrogen is built into helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees
It is still the case... the Washington Times is a creepy conservative rag, owned by a very creepy conservative religious organization.... but as the article explains, if a gas main explosion sends little hot pebbles all over the place, professionals will be standing by to clean them up.. Feel better now?
Trivial as it may seem, energy gained by tidal power is, erg for erg, slowing down the rotation of the Earth. True right now the results are inconsequential, but if massive projects were undertaken to supply 30% of the Earth's onging power needs with tidal forces, over the long run it could have an impact, and it's not exactly like we have a way to repair the damage by speeding up the Earth's rotation...
At least clean fission only eats up matter which, though not a renewable resource either, is constantly being replenished on the order of tons a day from micrometeorites.
Kevin Fox
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Kevin Fox
I am in need of enlightenment.
e -of-a-walnut mind takes this to mean, there are other possibilities. Does anyone know of any research being done on this? (Of course, with the fear of anything nuclear that seems to prevail in modern society, I wouldn't be surprised if a project like this would find difficulty getting funding.)
;)
Nuclear Fission releases incredibly large amounts of energy, even when it is a controlled fission such as that in a nuclear reactor. If I understand correctly, nuclear fusion is capable of releasing as much as if not more energy. But like the topic says, IANANP.
Now, perhaps I read too much science fiction, but surely there must be a better way of harnessing this energy than using it to boil water (in the case of current nuclear power stations) or heat up helium (in the case of this article) to turn a turbine to create electricity. It seems to me that a LOT of energy would be lost in the transfer from heat to mechanical to electrical energy.
The article mentions that "The early designers and builders minimized the risk of their projects by combining the new nuclear fission--based heaters with the well-proven closed-cycle steam engines." So, my Isaac-Asimov-reading-lets-build-a-reactor-the-siz
I dunno, but it seems like an awful lot of energy is being wasted in the current reactors, including these new PBMRs mentioned in the article
And I have to admit, I wouldn't mind having a personal sized one to power my home for a couple of years (decades? centuries??...depending on the amount of fuel). Oh well...perhaps I was just born a few hundred years too early.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
Nuclear fission in your basement? SAY! That is a clever idea. This is what old sub commanders think about when they retire. QUOTE: Eskom, a large public utility in South Africa, has taken a serious look at nuclear fission technology and is committed to the pre commercial development of an alternative type of machine called the pebble bed modular reactor (PBMR)..... Of course, the early adopters of such a technology will not be average homeowners. A likely initial customer might be the owner of an isolated tropical island or a remote mountain with a spectacular view. (AN IMPORTANT MARKET I'M SURE, MH) The machines could be designed as black boxes containing a decade or more of fuel and needing only a cooling supply and a place to put the output power. They would not spoil the view with an exhaust stack and could be buried to muffle all noise. (ON THE OTHER HAND, WHEN FORGOTTEN AND REDISCOVERED 200 YEARS LATER, THEY MIGHT POISON ALL LOCAL DRINKING WATER ... BUT NEVER MIND, NEVER MIND, AT LEAST THOSE ANNOYING SMOKE STACKS WON'T BOTHER THE ISLAND'S OWNER...)
The possibility of home-size cousins of the PBMR coming to a neighborhood might raise concerns. (WHAT ME WORRY?) What if an external explosion, as from a ruptured natural gas main, shattered the tough shield surrounding the PBMR and scattered the pebbles? (HOW COULD THAT HAPPEN, IN OUR MODERN SOCIETY?) In such a scenario, the radioactive material would remain contained within the pebbles. (OH DR. SCIENCE, I'M SO GLAD THE PUBLIC IS SAFE!) Of course, the pebbles would be hot, in terms of both temperature and radioactivity. (WELL... THAT DOES SOUND MILDLY WORRYING.... LITTLE HOT RADIOACTIVE PEBBLES ALL OVER THE NEIGHBORHOOD... SHOULD I WORRY?) Residents would need to be evacuated until professionals collected all the pebbles, but then they could return safely to their homes. (OH GOOD.. FOR A MOMENT I WAS WORRIED, BUT SINCE THERE WOULD BE PROFESSIONAL PEBBLE COLLECTORS INVOLVED, I'M SURE EVERYTHING WILL BE OK!!!)
END QUOTE
And there is not a single mention of nuclear waste, fission by products, or waste disposal issues!
2-3% of it will always be "in the transportation tube" rolling down local railways, interstates, and highways. And if one of these trains derails? Or truck jack-knifes?
Then the heavily-armoured barrels get their paint scuffed.
I don't trust nuclear waste barrels to last a hundred thousand years, but I do trust them to survive anything short of a point-blank strike from heavy artillery.
If you *do* fire heavy artillery at point-blank range into a nuclear waste barrel, you'll get a clould of glass shrapnel - the safest transportable form of nuclear waste puts waste oxides into glass, where they stay (glass is quite durable and resistant to chemical attack). Scrape up the first foot of soil for a quarter of a mile around, put that in barrels, and sent it to the waste dump along with everything else. No additional contamination.
In summary, I don't think that accidents during transport are a concern. I'd be more worried about deliberate theft, and the risk of that can be made no worse than it already is with waste stored at power plants.
Also, storing waste at the plants is not a viable long-term solution, as they aren't in earthquake-free regions isolated from the water table. One good disaster, and *all* of the plant's waste goes into the environment.
They don't have to be buried. Extract the plutonium and use it up in a reactor designed for it. Put the other stuff in the business end of a nuclear accelerator, or park it on the edge of a fission reactor, and make it break down sooner than by waiting for natural decay.
The problem with any scheme that involves chemical reprocessing - which used to be widespread - is that you get a lot of minor mishaps occuring, which exposes workers and the nearby environment to small amounts of Really Nasty Stuff (tm).
If I understand correctly, worker health liabilities were why plutonium reprocessing plants were abandoned, but in general, it's just plain safer to seal up the waste in very sturdy containers and drop them in the continental sheild.
As far as transmuting the waste is concerned, there are problems. If you stick waste next to a large neutron source (like a reactor), it will be transmuted. Continuously. This has the good effect of transmuting long-lived radioactive isotopes into shorter-lived ones, and the bad effect of transmuting non-radioactive decay products into radioactive isotopes. This won't magically make the waste non-radioactive (well, after a few centuries of this, it might all end up as the four stable lead isotopes, but don't hold your breath).
In summary, while burying the waste in mine shafts is an imperfect solution, it's one of the best ones that we currently have. We can always dig it up later if we find a really good way to dispose of it.
The big problem for nuclear power is that the Nuclear power industry has lied and lied and lied. It is no wonder that the public don't trust nuclear power, they would be morons if they did.
The only reason Chernobyl went up and Three Mile Island did not is luck. Both reactors were designed using inadequate computing power. Chernobyl went critical because there was a region of positive feedback in the operation cycle that was not uncovered using the two dimensional simulation techniques used in both the USSR and the US at the time.
If the west was so smart in its nuclear power strategy Three Mile Island would never have been choosen as a site with Manhattan right next door.
The problem today is that having lied about the costs, the safety and the military use of byproducts the civil nuclear industry is going to have a hard time being trusted even if it is proposing an entirely different technology.
Pebble bed and Heavy Water designs are both intrinsically safe technologies that will 'fail safe' in case of failure. Unfortunately the nuclear industry claimed that the intrinsically unstable and dangerous AGR and light water designs were 'fail safe'.
The backers of pebble bed have a point. However having been lied to the public is entirely rational in not trusting the experts again. The idiot in the Whitehouse is certainly not someone I would trust to ensure that safety standards were enforced. The administration has reneged on pledges to not drill off the coast of Florida and to implement C02 emissions caps, arsenic in drinking water is OK. And that is the crew to be trusted to regulate nuclear power?
We may need to start using Nuclear Power in the future, however I think we can wait another four years for a President who is not in the pocket of the energy companies before we let that genie out of the bottle again.
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Yeah, you know me!
Do people seem to forget that there is entropy in this universe? All production of electricity causes some form of energy loss. Thus the obvious problem of efficiency.
Nuclear power is very efficient, and does not pollute much. Sure, the pollutants are highly toxic, but there is a smaller proportion of it, than to coal power (as an example). I'd rather have nuclear than coal. Coal pollutes the atmosphere and is far worse than nuclear power, as is oil, and other fossil-fuel based power sources.
Water power is clean but all of the prime locations have been used... thus further plants would be on less effective/efficient sites and end up being very expensive ways of ruining the surrounding ecosystem.
Solar and wind power are not constant enough yet to be relied upon as a sole source of electricity. In addition, these technologies cannot be used universally, some locations will see a benefit while most will not be economical.
Tidal power is effective, but cannot be implemented everywhere (and I mean every oceanside town here). The local topography needs to be just right for tidal power to be economical.
Fusion power is not economical yet either, although there are projects in the works.
So that leaves us with dams and nuclear power (fission) as our clean energy sources...
The problem with nuclear power is that the public is uneducated about the safeness of the power production process. In the US and Europe, nuclear power is extremely safe because it is highly regulated. Safety measures are considered, then will be increased beyond the engineers' original specifications. Chernobyl was as bad as it was because Russia couldn't afford to build a safe plant... they followed the motto "good enough for government work."
This is for all the folks who told you fusion powers the hydrogen bomb:
The H-bomb uses a fission trigger which supplies about 10% of its energy output. The prompt gamma rays from this blast are used to compress and trigger the secondary stage; this must occur before the mechanical blast rips the secondary apart.
The secondary contains a stick of fission fuel surrounded by fusion fuel surrounded by a thick, depleted Uranium tamper. When the assembly is compressed the stick of fission fuel fissions, providing neutrons which...
Finally, the incredibly huge mass of neutrons generated by the fusion reaction induce fission in the depleted Uranium tamper, yielding about 80% of the bomb's energy. Now we have an explosion. And 90% of the energy comes from fission, not fusion.
The mantra about H-bombs being "clean" is just one of the many lies told by the nuclear industry to make itself look more useful than it really is. Richard Rhodes' books The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb have many more details about how the current situation came about.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]