Green fission ??? I don't think so. LOL.
Fission by any other name is dirtier-than-dirt (but cleaner than burning coal) so to call it "green" is a sacrilege in a way, even if we use thorium or natural U (un-enriched) as the fuel. Nevertheless, if a fission reactor can be made strongly subcritical - thus to avoid any possibility of another Fukushima event, and also burn up most of its ash during operation - then it is possible that yes- a less-toxic version could find a place in a future mix of energy resources where we manage to eliminate coal. Coal-burning puts far more radioactivity into the environment than nuclear, even when you factor in an occasional Fukushima or Chernobyl failure every decade. Of course, this would be assuming that LENR does not materialize as a viable resource... but, as most of us here opine, that will happen - and if it does, and there is no valid reason even to speculate on creating a future dependency on cleaner fission. It is almost as laughable as "legitimate rape." Nevertheless - in the event that we are wrong - on Nickel-hydrogen in particular, there could be benefit from using some of the findings of LENR - particularly nano-geometry and dense loading - in a novel form of fission which is strongly subcritical, uses natural U and burns its own waste in situ. Actually this demands only one thing: a cheap and robust external source of neutrons. Is that possible? Maybe it is, with dense hydrogen (IRH) and especially dense deuterium. The known solution for copious external neutrons - with which to feed such a subcritical reactor, is far from cheap. It is a beam line, usually operating in the GeV range of particle acceleration. Cost $500 million and up. This is what 'big physics' is pushing for strongly, since they are familiar with it, and it will continue their influence over the field, since it is obvious to almost everyone that hot fusion is a bust. However, another possibility is a short, cheap accelerator for a "loaded" LENR target. This could be the answer to all of the objections. By "short" we are talking 10 meters max, and a cost three orders of magnitude less than a beam line. We can call this concept "warm ICF" to distinguish it from LERN. Basically what we are looking for is "dense deuterium" (inverted Rydberg deuterium) loaded into a metal matrix, so that when a BB-sized pellet is moderately accelerated into a target, at almost trivial acceleration, we see a few percent of the deuterium being "stripped" of neutrons (Oppenheimer Phillips effect). That would do it elegantly and cheaply. However, even 'thinking small' like this, it combines the worst feature of "big physics" which is high cost of development and long lag time, with the worst feature of LENR (lack of theory to explain "stripping" which is probably a form of LENR in its broadest context). In fact, I wish I had back the 15 minutes it took to write this post ... since the idea is dead-in-the-water, as a practical matter, because it offends almost everyone concerned ! Jones
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