Gordon Brown's Nuclear Policy? Energy and/or Weapons?

Scott2006 · Gordon Brown's Nuclear Policy? Energy and/or Weapons?

The weapons in the category of Trident or its replacement only work due to the nature of tapping into nuclear energy released in an explosion after a series of nuclear fission reactions.

Because nuclear energy is used or could be used for indiscriminate mass destruction - that colours the public attitude to all things nuclear.

Pakistan having nuclear weapons is unsettling for the western democracies who worry that a muslim zealot might get control of such a weapon and answer an inner voice from Allah to destoy the infidels.

Nuclear fission weaponry is not ideal, far from it, but it is impossible to uninvent the wheel - we have to live with them while trying to limit the numbers of weapons.

Nuclear Enery is, in the evidence of some of the experiments, and in the rational well-reasoned exploration of the interactions at sub-atomic level of experts in their field, are in a matter of 30 or 40 years away from fully explained nuclear fusion energy generating power even at 30% efficiency to power a turbine providing energy of near unlimited potential.

Hot fusion energy is 30 years away as the best level of interaction of Hydrogen in its two rarer isotopes interacting with Lithium to produce Helium and no waste that is radioactive at all requires a way of controlling the pressure at intervals of 10 to the minus 21 of a second - outside of what we can currently achieve but not with incremental advances that leading scientists have experienced at the leading curve of new knowledge.

40 years from now the range of pressure and a time scale of 10 to the minus 23 or minus 25 of a second should be explorable - only at that range can a pulsed laser excitation type of fusion become viable. In short, cold fusion at a scale and in sufficient quantity to solve the energy problem for as long as humanity can cling to this rock without destroying ourselves.

Tony Blair showed typical short term short sightedness - Nuclear fission energy is a white elephant as the nuclear fission power plants he gave his blessing to will be only 10 or 20 years into production when they will be a failed old technology only useful for preparing fissionable weaponry.

Morph

Are the time scales you have quoted for experimental levels of this energy or are they timescales for working models, eg a reality

Scott2006

http://www.iter.org/a/index_faq.htm Gives a realistic if slightly longer answer in the 2045 to 2055 range.

Ignition levels are not yet being reached and plasma purity problems are an issue but scaling up from present knowledge where Pressure ( Pressure = density multiplied by temperature)of 1 bar that on the Earth's surface and a temperature in the 100-200 million degrees C for Magnetic confinement with a confinement time (tau) of 5 seconds.

Inertial Confinement in the same Temperature range 100-200 million degrees C (also represented as approx 10-20keV) which may lead to a more understandable version of cold fusion in the long run needs a Pressure 5 billion times that of atmospheric pressure and a confinement time (tau) of 1 billionth of a second, (10 to minus 9 of a second)

Cold Fusion has seemingly been achieved with very inexpensive materials at universities in the USA but the processes have not been fully explained or are always replicated - but have been demonstrated to run for days at a time - this might be a process that works but scientists need between $100 million and $500 million to develop series of larger scaleworking models. This type of research was widely ridiculed in 1989 when scientists at the University of Utah held a news conference to announce cold fusion but were later proved to be wrong.

The Hot Fusion technology where most serious research is ongoing with Japanese, Russian and Americans continuing small scale experiments while the 'Nuclear Club' (of nations with nuclear weapons or those like South Korea and Japan willing to invest in a joint project) with the ITER project in Cadarache, in the south of France is a factor of 10 away from a more advanced prototype that would be comercially viable.

To quote from Fusion - The Energy of the Universe - by C. McCracken, P. Stott

One of the things that raise public concern about anything connected with the word nuclear is safety—the fear that a nuclear reactor might get out of control and explode or melt down. Fusion has a significant advantage compared to fission in this respect—a fusion power plant is intrinsically safe; it cannot explode or “run away.” Unlike a fission power plant, which contains a large quantity of uranium or plutonium fuel, enough to keep it going for many years, a fusion power plant contains only a very small amount of deuterium and tritium fuel. Typically there is about 1 gram—enough to keep the reaction going for only a few seconds.
If fuel is not continually replaced, the fusion reaction goes out and stays out.
A second safety consideration is the radioactive waste. A fission reactor produces two types of radioactive waste. The most difficult to process and store are the waste products that result from the fission fuel cycle—these are intensely radioactive substances that need to be separated from the unused fuel and then stored safely for tens of thousands of years. The fusion fuel cycle produces none of these radioactive waste products—the waste product is helium gas, which is not toxic or radioactive. The tritium fuel itself is radioactive, but it decays relatively quickly (the half-life is 12.3 years). And in any case all the tritium fuel that
is produced will be recycled quickly and burned in the power plant. An important safety feature is that there need be no shipments of radioactive fuels into or out of the fusion plant. The raw materials necessary for the fusion fuel, lithium and water, are completely nonradioactive. There is enough lithium to last for at least tens of thousands of years and enough deuterium in the oceans to be truly inexhaustible. Moreover, these raw materials are widely distributed, making it impossible for any one country to corner the market. More advanced types of fusion may be developed in the very long term to burn only deuterium.
The second source of waste from a nuclear power plant is the structure of
the reactor—this is made radioactive by the neutrons emitted during the nuclear reactions. Fusion and fission are broadly similar in this respect, and some component of the structure of a fusion power plant will become intensely radioactive.
Components that have to be removed for repair or replacement will have to be handled using remote robots and stored inside massive concrete shields. However, the lifetime of these structural wastes is much shorter than that of fission fuel waste products.

With careful design and choice of materials, the level of radioactivity left by a fusion power plant after it has been closed down for about 100 years could be comparable with that left by a coal-fired power plant.

Radioactivity from a coal-fired power plant is at first rather surprising. Of course burning coal does not produce any new radioactivity, but coal contains uranium (as well as many other toxic elements) which is released into the environment when coal is burned. Although the concentration of uranium in coal is relatively small, the total quantities are surprisingly large. About 3.5 million tons of coal have to be burned to produce 1 gigawatt-year of electricity (the requirement of a typical industrial city), and this contains over 5 tons of uranium. This is in fact more uranium that would be used to supply the electricity from a nuclear fission power plant. Some of the uranium escapes into the air, but most is left in the ash, which is buried in landfill sites.

Scott2006

Confinement time is a bit misleading as it depends on cross-sectional areas and the overall best combination of factors to give the lowest successful ignition conditions.

This might make it a little bit clearer or maybe as clear as mud!

If you think of Confinement time as being the length of a football match say 90 minutes or 5400 seconds and only 1 goal is scored. Then the confinement time would be 5400seconds the conditions neccesary to see a goal scored, but if you were observant for all 90 minutes, you would know it would be only part of a second for all observers to go from seeing the score as 0-0 to celebrating a 1-0 lead. If a player scrambles a ball over the line from inches out where the defence couldn't clear the ball for say ten seconds, the observers or crowd would be expecting a goal any second and on their feet, yet the final touch from the player with sufficient velocity to put in the net might only take a tenth of a second to cross the line of the goal.

Neil

Fusion is 30 years away from practical use & has been for 50 years.

If it got anywhere close to being workable the eco crowd would come out against it. They occasionally pretend not to be Luddites but when you get down to it all the systems (windmilss, microgenerating, biofuels) require massive subsidy, rarely work & do little, nothing or in the case of biofuels considerably less than than zero, to work.