On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 11:38 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: > In reply to [email protected]'s message of Tue, 27 Mar 2012 13:38:41 -0400 > (EDT): > Hi, > > Nuclear reactors are already way past self sustaining. In fact they produce > huge > amounts of excess power that is sold and consumed as electrical power. > However I suspect you are trying to lead this discussion into UFOs. ;) > The radioactivity is not a consequence of inefficiency. It's a natural > consequence of the fissioning of heavy nuclei with neutrons. > This is because heavy nuclei are "neutron rich" relative to light nuclei, so > when a heavy nucleus is fissioned, creating two or more light nuclei, there > are > always a few neutrons "left over". > Some of these escape as free neutrons (and continue the chain reaction), > others > remain attached to the daughter nuclei (i.e. the fission fragments), which are > then radioactive (because they basically have too many neutrons). > Interesting side note: If you could initiate the fission reaction with protons > iso with a neutron, then you could conceivably end up with stable fission > fragments (i.e. not radioactive). > >>Right, that's somewhat how I thought they operated, and so my follow-up >>question is what if the energy being produced simply wasn't distributed >>'perse >>to various facilities or buildings, facilities, households, or >>what-have-you,,, but instead rather, for a more highly efficient purpose or >>function? >> >>IOW's, instead of simply expending energy, why not use it in a more highly >>efficient manner, so as to enable it to operate on a self-sustaining mode. > >>Now, the purpose of having a self-sustaining Plant (no energy expended) >>would first be to eliminate any radioactive-waste by-product. >> >>The other main idea or benefit to having a powerfully efficient >>self-sustaining system would of course depend on the development of some new >>revolutionary breakthrough engineering skills, that can enable an altogether >>new >>compatable form of propulsion (yet unknown to us) to be directly integrated >>within the Plant, so to operate at peak performance, on-demand. >> >><< That is exactly what a nuclear power plant does... (well, not yet...)
In case you're not familiar, there's a huge project called ITER which is trying to achieve fusion, with better funding than the LHC. -X
