Much safer than newly built reactors using decades old designs for making Plutonium used as power generators, with every safety feature forcefully disabled and during a drill to investigate the feasibility of a condition live, the effects of which weren’t known by any operator and the drill hadn’t been tested in an offline experiment before nor was it even simulated. Then, maybe.
> A series of 50-kiloton bombs would be dropped into the cavern and exploded to heat the water and create steam. The steam would then power a secondary cooling loop for power extraction using a steam turbine. Dropping about two bombs a day would cause the system to reach thermal equilibrium, allowing the continual extraction of about 2 GW of electrical power
For some reason (that I haven’t figured out yet) thermonuclear bombs are just so much more efficient than any other proposed fission or fusion reaction.
It’s strange that controlled fusion is an energy sink, but whatever black magic is happening inside an H-bomb manages to unlock so much “free” energy.
> It’s strange that controlled fusion is an energy sink, but whatever black magic is happening inside an H-bomb manages to unlock so much “free” energy.
E=mc^2. The proportion of the original mass converted to energy in fusion is higher than it is for fission.
The trouble with fusion is that you need really high temperatures and pressures to sustain it. You can easily sustain a fission reaction at a few hundred degrees C, or even lower than that if you wanted to (but the general goal is to boil water to run a steam turbine so >100°C is what you want).
Fusion requires millions of degrees, which would vaporize most things you might want to use as a container, so instead they use strong magnetic fields and then you spend a lot of energy maintaining the magnetic field. A bomb doesn't care about that because sustained operation isn't required and vaporizing everything in the vicinity is kind of the idea.
Moreover, efficiency isn't really the issue. The efficiency of fission is already absurd. Fission of a given mass of uranium generates the same amount of energy as burning 2.7 million times that amount coal -- by mass, it's even more by volume.
The main advantages of fusion are that hydrogen is a lot more common than uranium (though uranium is still pretty available) and that the byproduct of fusion is helium (a non-radioactive noble gas with general usefulness), whereas some of the fission byproducts are variously radioactive or have limited known commercial applications.
Fusion is ridiculously efficient and effective power source. The problem with it is that it is very hard to created conditions where fusion can happen. The one reliable way we have that doesn't take more energy in than it outputs, is to detonate a fission bomb and use the x-rays to compress a fusion secondary.
The history of fusion research for the past 70 years is trying to figure out a cost-effective way to trigger enough fusion to make net energy without a nuke. So far, we've got bupkis. (The magnetic containment approaches using high-temperature superconductors seem promising, but we won't know they actually work until we've built them.)
Even the cleanest bombs (97%+ fusion rather than fission) turned out to be too dirty for basically everything civilian (unlocking gas reservoirs - too radioactive; landscaping to replace enormous amounts of conventional explosives - too radioactive).
Fission fragment rocket engines are also (theoretically) extremely efficient.. using the particles that come out of the reaction directly as a high-velocity exhaust stream.
Much safer than newly built reactors using decades old designs for making Plutonium used as power generators, with every safety feature forcefully disabled and during a drill to investigate the feasibility of a condition live, the effects of which weren’t known by any operator and the drill hadn’t been tested in an offline experiment before nor was it even simulated. Then, maybe.
Nuclear bombs are meant to go boom. Any part that doesn't go boom is waste whose weight could be better allocated to making it have a bigger boom.
next step: use nukes as an energy source
Check out this 1970s project that proposed extracting electricity from thermonuclear explosions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_PACER
> A series of 50-kiloton bombs would be dropped into the cavern and exploded to heat the water and create steam. The steam would then power a secondary cooling loop for power extraction using a steam turbine. Dropping about two bombs a day would cause the system to reach thermal equilibrium, allowing the continual extraction of about 2 GW of electrical power
There was also project Plowshare, as chronicled by Kurzgesagt at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3DCdWyb0cc
Which was building canals etc with nuclear bombs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare
In the end we're just boiling water.
"Hey boss, do you think there is a chance this scheme might introduce radioactive byproducts into the ground water?"
"Shut up"
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Coming soon: thermonuclear fracking.
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For some reason (that I haven’t figured out yet) thermonuclear bombs are just so much more efficient than any other proposed fission or fusion reaction.
It’s strange that controlled fusion is an energy sink, but whatever black magic is happening inside an H-bomb manages to unlock so much “free” energy.
> It’s strange that controlled fusion is an energy sink, but whatever black magic is happening inside an H-bomb manages to unlock so much “free” energy.
E=mc^2. The proportion of the original mass converted to energy in fusion is higher than it is for fission.
The trouble with fusion is that you need really high temperatures and pressures to sustain it. You can easily sustain a fission reaction at a few hundred degrees C, or even lower than that if you wanted to (but the general goal is to boil water to run a steam turbine so >100°C is what you want).
Fusion requires millions of degrees, which would vaporize most things you might want to use as a container, so instead they use strong magnetic fields and then you spend a lot of energy maintaining the magnetic field. A bomb doesn't care about that because sustained operation isn't required and vaporizing everything in the vicinity is kind of the idea.
Moreover, efficiency isn't really the issue. The efficiency of fission is already absurd. Fission of a given mass of uranium generates the same amount of energy as burning 2.7 million times that amount coal -- by mass, it's even more by volume.
The main advantages of fusion are that hydrogen is a lot more common than uranium (though uranium is still pretty available) and that the byproduct of fusion is helium (a non-radioactive noble gas with general usefulness), whereas some of the fission byproducts are variously radioactive or have limited known commercial applications.
Fusion is ridiculously efficient and effective power source. The problem with it is that it is very hard to created conditions where fusion can happen. The one reliable way we have that doesn't take more energy in than it outputs, is to detonate a fission bomb and use the x-rays to compress a fusion secondary.
The history of fusion research for the past 70 years is trying to figure out a cost-effective way to trigger enough fusion to make net energy without a nuke. So far, we've got bupkis. (The magnetic containment approaches using high-temperature superconductors seem promising, but we won't know they actually work until we've built them.)
Even the cleanest bombs (97%+ fusion rather than fission) turned out to be too dirty for basically everything civilian (unlocking gas reservoirs - too radioactive; landscaping to replace enormous amounts of conventional explosives - too radioactive).
Not really? How do you define efficiency here?
Thermonuclear bombs literally create lots of heat, and don’t tend to drive anything that produces work. It’s the opposite of efficient.
Just like lighting gasoline on fire and claiming that that’s more efficient than a combustion energy…
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In order to trigger an H bomb, you first trigger a regular fission bomb to generate the necessary energy to trigger the second fusion stage.
So, fission bombs are the black magic.
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Some of the nuclear rocket propulsion ideas propose exactly that, like Project Orion.
Fission fragment rocket engines are also (theoretically) extremely efficient.. using the particles that come out of the reaction directly as a high-velocity exhaust stream.
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If you like Orion check out Project Pluto (they even built some some test bench engines)
did they ever figure out how to brake? Spin the ship 180 degrees and bomb the front?
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