Slashdot Mirror
Lightning Fusion And Other Hot News
DumbSwede writes "PhysOrg.com reports that according to calculations by B.M. Kuzhevsky, the head of the neutron research lab at Moscow State University, neutron levels far above normal background levels exist during lightning strikes. While only a small percentage of rainwater contains atoms of deuterium, the lightning still provides enough energy to create fusion events. Frequent Slashdot readers no doubt remember recent articles on Fusion induced by sonic compression and more recently by pyroelectric effect. Perhaps more controversially, and yet to be discussed on Slashdot, the NIF has possible plans for a hybrid fusion approach that uses not only deuterium and tritium, but uranium and plutonium as well in what amounts to a miniaturized version of how thermonuclear weapons achieve fusion. Fears are that this could lead directly to micro-H-bombs. This year has also seen the final selection of France for the ITER experimental Fusion Reactor site. With all the recent discoveries and developments in fusion research, my question for Slashdotters - are we on the verge of something big that will make fusion a practical reality in a much shorter time frame than the often quoted '30 years away, and always will be'?"
We really shouldn't spare any resources researching and developing fusion power. It has the potential to solve many of our environmental and energy-scarcity problems in one fell swoop.
The development of fusion is more important than just about any other scientific project, as the abundance of cheap energy would enable other projects. And yet how much are governments/energy companies devoting to it? Less than what we spend securing a limited oil supply in an unstable part of the world. I wish we had more far-sighted, responsible leaders who are interested in more than lining their own pockets or winning the next election (pretty much the same thing).
I wouldn't say enviromentalist per se, but more of the anti corporateist that took over the large envirmental groups years ago.
The founder of green peace is NOT anti nuclear. How ever he left as it becamme more about stopping corporation, and less about making them become enviromentally friendly. Which nuclear power is.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The fair contest idea seems to have been picked up around that time by the X-Prize guys and taken to resounding success, for which we should all be grateful. The need for fusion prizes remains.
Seastead this.
I assume you mean "Chernobyls". More than that, actually. Coal mine accidents killed about 6000 (six thousands) people in 2004, the enormous majority in China. China is also the main coal supplier of the USA. Is that why coal is considered "safer than nuclear"? Because only some Chinese die?
It should also be noted that coal's carbon structure is a natural trap for heavy elements, especially uranides (thorium mostly), which is why you register a significant radiation level downwind from a coal-burning powered plant. You can wash the combustion output, but then you have to dispose acidic, radioactive sludge. Naaah. See this article.
But most of the pollution is not even coming from coal-burning plants, as explained in this article.. Excerpt: According to Stracher's forthcoming article in the "International Journal of Coal Geology," scientists have determined that coal fires in China consume up to 200 million tons of coal per year. For comparison, coal consumption in the United States during 2000 was just over one billion tons, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
Since CO2 is formed by binding two oxygen atoms (molar wight 16) on each carbon atom (molar w. 12), 200 million tons of coal at 80% carbon form about 200* 0.8 * 16 * 2/ 12 = 427 million tons CO2. So when I hear well-meaning but clueless environmentalists worrying about cow farts while ignoring this huge problem, I know that whoever feeds them this disinformation has an agenda.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
We've had one meltdown in the commercial reactors in the US that was due to not following procedure and about ~30 something things going wrong simultaniously. Radiation released to the public was about the amount you'd get on a couple cross country flights. We don't have a problem with this in the US.
No, we have not had any meltdowns in the US. A meltdown is when the reactor core overheats, and you get molten fissile material burning a hole through the bottom of the reactor.
Three Mile Island was not a meltdown, it was a fairly small (intentional) release of radioactive gas*, done to avoid the possibility of an explosion of hydrogen that operators thought might have been generated by high-temperature steam that was released through a series of other problems and errors. Even if the operators hadn't released that gas, and there had been an explosion, it almost certainly still would not have lead to a meltdown. Unlike reactors designed by Soviet communist fools, American reactors do not operate in or near a regime with positive feedback. Canadian CANDU reactors are even safer, as the moderator required for the reaction to happen (heavy water, or D2O) is also the coolant. If something goes wrong, it boils off, and the reaction stops before anything gets too out of hand. Pebble bed reactors are even safer--as I understand it, they operate in a regime where Doppler broadening at high temperatures decreases the neutron capture cross-section enough to stop the reaction. The point is that Three Mile Island wasn't actually a very dangerous failure, and that it wasn't close to being a meltdown. It was bad, but probably also a worst case for a US reactor.
As others have pointed out, it is true that nuclear is more expensive than natural gas-generated power, however the cost of natural gas power depends primarily on the cost of natural gas (whereas uranium is a small portion of the cost with nuclear power). If you also include a reasonable carbon tax, nuclear can start looking pretty good. It's the only serious non-CO2 producing candidate for baseline electricity production. Wind and solar can effectively be used supplementally, but as a baseline source, you'd have to factor in the cost of storing power for use at night or during cloudy or calm periods, and that's going to be extremely expensive. Most reasonable proponents of wind power will tell you it's not ever going to make up more than 10 or 15% of US power, even in a best case. With solar, you can do some simple calculations based on the solar radiation flux and realize that the land area required for it to replace most or all of our energy needs would be absurd (as in, by a couple decades from now, we'd have to cover an area larger than California with solar). Hydro is great, but there are a fixed number of rivers around to dam, and it's very hard politically. There's no way, for instance, that Hetch Hetchy could be dammed today--in fact, that dam may eventually get removed for environmental reasons.
*the amount of radioactive material released during the Three Mile Island incident was such that, if you were standing immediately outside the power plant's outer fence during the whole thing, you would have received a dose equal to a normal year's worth of background radiation in the US, or about 3 months' worth of background in France. Background radiation varies subtantially by geographic region due to naturally occuring radioactive elements in the soil.
One more thing for the spelling Nazis who were picking on someone for spelling Chernobyl as "Chernoble": since Russia and the Ukraine use a different alphabet than we do, English translations of place names are just transliterations. For some names (such as Chebychev, aka Chebyshev, aka Tchebychev), there are several common English spellings. It may well be the case that Chernoble is simply a less common transliteration. I don't know, and I suspect you don't, either, so give the guy a break.