Science/Engineering/Technical forums

Well heck, surround it with water, put some MOX fuel around it, and get fission / enrichment along with it as a tertiary byproduct increasing energy output???!!

Just throwing thoughts around.

Hybrid fusion-fission has been tossed around as an idea for awhile, I think, just in case we couldn't get fusion to gain on its own. It has the advantage of being able to run sub-critical on the fission side (but not much - you still need to be close) so it's safe in the sense that it's easy to turn off. It's bad in the sense that the fission wastes are still happening...
The main advantage of fission in more energy per produced neutron - ~~ 200 MeV vs 3.5 or so (assuming DD and not something more exotic). Obviously, the downside with any fission is the byproducts unless you could somehow use those for medical isotopes. My understanding is that the useful ones aren't predominant, though.

I could certainly try it a little - I have a little fissionable/breedable junk in my toy box. But the resulting mess (assuming enough original neutron flux to even tell)...is scary. I suppose in a tiny enough amount, we could prove our point by looking at the resulting waste with a gamma spectrometer. Kind of an integrating neutron dosimeter.

For now, we are hot on the heels of actual net gain - so that's the road we plan to go down. Did a deal with what we think is an outstanding patent law firm yesterday - and was told to keep my mouth shut about the details for now. Hopefully we can get some provisional protection so I can tell all and not have some jerk steal it (legally) from the world.

Someone else said this better than me (not a frequent occurrence). Paul Shatzkin said "no one should own fire". I agree. We only want to own it in order to give it away for what is chump change in the biz.

Well I'm ready to form a company to build plants, or retrofit coal plants, whatever works best. When we are building 600 to 1000 MW plants, chump change for the plant can be pretty good for the individuals who started the project, with the added benefit of ridding the world of coal. Happy to help when you are ready to talk business structure and funding.

Thanks, I can see you're not arithmetic-challenged, Jake. Yup, should be plenty to go around - chump change for these guys (in other words, far, far less than it would cost them to tackle us legally, give them an excuse to raise prices etc - although they always find excuses for that) - is still a lot for us. Everyone wins. Or we just get paid to design custom plants for them - depends on the scaling.
We don't know the answer to that one yet - depends on what we find once I can remote control the thing. I don't plan to go to real high power with it in my yard...
Like Red Hat - support is where the bucks are anyway - you can basically give the thing away and still make out fine.

We'll be in touch when and if. Right now, we're just going through the grind to get to point A - point B is a little way off.

The reason I bring up the hybrid fission-fusion, is the same thermodynamic principle of a turbocharger on an internal combustion engine. If you have waste energy not being utilized, why not do what you can to increase the efficiency of the system as a whole, right? Just a long term project idea to help utilize more of those escaping neutrons.

Yea, it's messy compared to fusion what with the double hump probability byproducts and all, but obviously it can be dealt with. More than likely going to have to submerge the reactor core anyway to extract the heat to do work for a turbine, and to shield the neutrons, might as well hybridize the reactor core.

it's a thought. There ARE things that fast-fission, but nothing with a huge neutron absorption cross section, and of course fission makes yet more neutrons (2+ per) - with about the same energy as we had already. Our neutrons are right at the low end of the range for fast-fissioning U-238... Nothing magically stops those either. Down near thermal (but above it, at a few eV, used to be classified info), U-238 has a big cross section, to be bred into 239, eventually becoming plutonium after a beta decay into Np239 and a further decay of that into Pu. Which is why most fission reactors need a moderator and segmented fuel to slow the neutrons below that big peak before they encounter U-238 in the fuel, else they'd be lost and you couldn't get to critical mass without extreme enrichment (See Fermi and his first big project there). I hope we can think of something more useful to do with neutrons - other then just letting them make gamms by decay or capture for heating. Like make medical isotopes and such. But about the best way to stop them - and the resulting gammas, is a big water bath (which could be in supercritical conditions for water), which we kind of need for a boiler anyway.

After all, if you're making neutrons with 2.5 Mev on them, you have a lot of possibilities, and I'd point out that this makes everyone's calculations of energy wrong - because when one is absorbed or decays, there's another approximately 2 MeV released, added to the original reaction output. It improves the number by around 23% or so.

Getting busy on the real deal after a bit of moving and shaking other things to be ready for this.