I suggest that friends of nuclear power start up this movement to fight the evil ignorant mass hysteria that permeates the world today.

But first of all, I have to work out what to do.

Of course, it will be completely independant of Bad Astronomy.

First, I think we should debate anti-Cassini people like the moon hoaxers. Perhaps we could start a newsletter. Here's the first one:

FREEDOM FOR FISSION NEWSLETTER #1:

Nuclear power is good.

The title is kind of discriminatory. What about fusion?

<Edit>

Oh yeah, nuclear power is good.

</Edit>

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Quaeso quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa veneris?

I can't imagine what objections environmentalists could possibly have to nuclear fusion power.

Well they have them. They're complaining that the experimental reactor that is going to be built (can't remember the name...) could be built in Canada. They think it's somehow bad for the environment and would release radiation. :roll:

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Quaeso quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa veneris?

HOW? HOW COULD A NUCLEAR FUSION REACTOR POSSIBLY DO ANY HARM?

Boy, am I getting fed up with these guys.

You are?!? I live in the same country as them!!! GGGRRRRRR!!!

Sorry. They tick me off.

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Quaeso quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa veneris?

But fusion reactors would need to use seawater as fuel. Think about the fish! Imagine you're a poor little clownfish minding your own business and all of a sudden you're sucked into some tube and splatted against a filtering screen until the life is sucked out of you. How can you even suggest that fusion reactors are harmless? And don't think you're going to get out of it by shipping the whole human race to Mars. There could be Martian Bacteria you know ... and they have rights too! You humans ... nothing but a bunch of invaders terrorizing poor helpless life on Earth, taking your claws and ripping them into the flesh of otherwise peaceful nature.

(Here's hoping the intentional irony put into that last part is not wasted).

Don't worry, it wasn't lost.

Maybe we should start by explaining how fission and fission reactors actually work. Start with the basics, you know?

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Quaeso quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa veneris?

Supreme,

I think that explaining how each works is a excellent idea. My question would be were do you store the waste products? How long does it have to be stored until it is no longer a danger?

What kind of waste is generated by a Fusion reactor? The same as a Fission?

Keep up the good work =D>

Many forms of Fusion power (Deuterium - Deuterium and Deuterium - Tritum for example) do release radiation. Not in the form of radioactive waste like fission but just as neutrons.

This means the core of the reactor will become radioactive itself as it absorbs the neutrons. But all things considered it's like not using coal power because fire scares very young kids.


Anyways, I'll join the Freedom for Fission group, but I want to be in charge of the "Why we need a lunar outpost/colony now" and "Why Helium-3 is your friend" debates

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People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.

orion11349:

The United States government has decided that all nuclear waste should be stored at the Yucca Mountain storage facility. They'll bury it under the mountain until it is no longer radioactive. The time it takes for materials to become non-radioactive varies. The half-lives of common radioactive materials are as follows:

Beryllium 2,700,000 years
Calcium 100,000 years
Cesium-137 half life - 30 years
Cesium-135 2,000,000 years
Rubidium 47,000,000,000 years
Palladium 7,000,000 years
iodine-129 17,200,000 years
plutonium-239 half life - 24,390 years
strontium-89 53 days
strontium-90 28 years
tin-126 100,000 years
uranium-235 713,000,000 years
uranium-238 4,510,000,000 years

Half-life is the time it takes for half of the substance to decay. For example, if you have a substance with a half-life of 1 day, half of it would be gone in 24 hours. 24 hours later half of the remaining substance would have decayed and so on.

Also, I'm fairly certain that fusion reactors do not produce waste in vast quantities, and it is not of the same kind as fission reactors.

Keep in mind, though, that I'm no expert. :wink:

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Quaeso quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa veneris?

Aren't the byproducts of fusion basically water?

I am all for fusion, but I do have some reservations about fission. Let me explain. When I was in HS most of my science projects were about nuclear fission, so I know a little bit. The waste of fission is a big problem and I am not satisfied that we know how to dispose of it properly. Then, there seems to be so many problems with the reactors and containment buildings. I believe the science is good but what can you expect when it is the lowest bidder who builds the facilities? Did you ever see The China Syndrome?

How about sending nuclear waste into the sun? Is it feasible? Safe?

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"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known." Carl Sagan

As I said, I'm no expert. I really don't know.

Also, sending nuclear waste into the sun would be safe, but launching it might not be. There is a lot of waste and it would require a lot of launches to get it all up. Statistically, something is likely to go wrong with the rocket. Not a good thing.

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Quaeso quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa veneris?

The byproducts of fusion can range from tritium (hydrogen-3) to helium and upwards past Lithium depending on the fuel used.

Water is not a by product since your using helium and hydrogen as your main fuels.

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People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.

Isn't the tritium used in furter reactions? Like a breeder reactor? (Bad analogy, but it gets the job done...)

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Quaeso quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa veneris?

No, tritium is the end product of the breeder reactors. Tritium is radioactive with a short half-life and is not readily available in nature.

I believe (as in too lazy to look it up) that Lithium-6 (might be 8, but I think it's 6) is used as a breeder fuel to create tritium. Could be wrong though.

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People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.

Arrgh, I have forgotten soooo much. Where did I come up with the water thing? I know better. #-o

So tritium is "made" from lithium and deuterium from water. Fuse them together and you get helium and neutrinos and some other stuff.

Got it! 8)

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"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known." Carl Sagan

Wait, wait. I was asking if the tritium created in fusion reactors is used to further fusion. I may have muddled the question with that awful breeder reactor analogy. Sorry. ops:

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Quaeso quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa veneris?

That and spelling further "furter", I thought you might have meant father in the breeder reactor.

But no, the tritium is not used to further fusion. The tritium is fused with deuturium and out pops a helium atom (he4), a free neutron (bad = radiation) and some energy (17.6 MeV).

To "make" the tritum, you irradiate lithium-6 with slow neutrons and out pops helium, tritum and 4.8 MeV. You can also use the more common Lithium-7 and bombard it with fast neutrons, that gives you helium, tritium and a slow electron.

More Information

Hmm, with all the information I keep having to look up on nuclear fusion and releated topics for all my posts, maybe I should consider switching my major over to nuclear physics. Maybe then I'll get around to graduating

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People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.

Ah ha! I get it now, thanks a lot. Sorry about that confusing post, I was a bit distracted. I really need to get a book about all of this... :wink:

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Quaeso quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa veneris?

The problem with He3* is that even though no "particle" radiation is released, the energy released is in the form of gamma rays. Eventually, the whole reactor gets hot and has to be disposed of properly. Similar to the faulty logic of claiming that electric cars are "clean". The pollution is just one step removed.

* Aside from:
1) Finding it.
2) Making any fusion reaction actually work!

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

I would say that nuclear power is neutral like all other technology. If it is not handled correctly it can be very dangerous. A lot of the opposition to nuclear power is due to insufficient information and bad management. The Supreme Canuck mentioned that USA stores it's nuclear waste at the Yucca Mountain storage facility, which happens to be situated on a volcanic fault line. In my opinion the largest drawback of nuclear power is the very long halflife of the waste. It is easy for us to just shove the waste into a large hole in the ground but in 10,000 - 50,000 years a lot of geological activity can happen and it is not certain that the people of that time will know of the danger. Nobody want a waste facility placed in their backyard, but in Europe it is hard to find a suitable place where noone lives closeby.

I'm not against nuclear power but i'm also not all positive about it, that would be too naive. While it looks good on paper the implementation is not good enough many places. Britain has Magnox reactors that were designed to run for only 20 to 25 years but some are still running eventhough they are 30 to 45 years old. The Sellafield reactor is quite infamous and has had a lot of problems during the years.

But nuclear waste wouldn't have been a problem if the fission products were reprocessed and reused. It's because of the anti-nukyular lobby that reprocessing was stopped. Then they complain about the resulting waste build up. They caused the problem in the first place.

Just to clarify, fission is more of the hot topic and since calling it Freedom For Fission and Fusion isn't quite as poetic, Freedom For Fission is better.

Why do I feel a long post coming on again....




But not all of it is highly radioactive. In most cases just burying it underground away from groundwater is sufficient. And, even though the environmentalists would hate me for saying this....... we could dump it in the ocean. It's very large and very deep, and it would only affect a very minimal proportion of ocean life. Personally I wouldn't have any problem with dumping nuclear waste into the Pacific Ocean.

But you have to understand why the implementation is bad. The current economics of nuclear power make it difficult to use. I do not know of the nuclear power situation in the UK but I do know of the situation in the United States, and it would not surprise me if they are similar.

Since TMI, the NRC has levied numerous, often arbitrary requirements for nuclear power plants to get licenses that make it almost impossible to get them. The US Capitol building in Washington, DC would be illegal to use as a nuclear power plant because the radiation levels are too high. Paperwork for setting up a nuclear plant is almost endless. It can take longer to finish it than to build the plant. Sometimes in the midst of construction requirements are changed, requiring new construction in place of what has already happened. Because of the extreme requirements put on nuclear power plants and the way they are built, each one is currently built slightly differently from others. There is not as of yet any "expertise" on building nuclear power plants because new teams of engineers build each one, causing the same mistakes to be made over and over. Once a reactor vessel at a California plant was installed backwards. And then the environmentalists can file hundreds of lawsuits, making it impossible to get the required licenses. Several nuclear power plants have been changed to coal in midconstruction because of the difficulty in obtaining licenses. Some plants were nearly finished for ten to fifteen years before obtaining licenses to operate.

The nuclear industry needs two things to become more economical. First, much of the paperwork needs to simplified as a great deal of it is arbitrary. If licenses are easier to get, plants will become easier to build. Second, there needs to be a more standard design for nuclear power plants, which will prevent mistakes from being made over and over. Right now, nuclear power plants can cost from $1 billion to $3 billion to build.

However, once built, nuclear power plants are far cheaper to operate than coal plants. The importance of this cannot be overstated. Almost all of coal plants' cost comes from their operating costs. They require thousands of trainloads of coal a year to operate. A nuclear power plant only requires a few truckloads of fresh fuel per year. Coal plants also must constantly run mining operations to get coal, in which many miners die. The pollution from coal plants is estimated to kill 50 people a day. The volume of waste produced is actually more than the orginal fuel, and they put more radiation into the environment than nuclear plants do.

So, because of the operating costs, the final cost per kilowatt hour to the customer is virtually the same to the customer. If nuclear power becomes easier to build by relaxing many of the arbitrary requirements and by using common designs, it will become much cheaper.

The anti-nukyular power activists don't care that coal plants are more radioactive than nuclear ones; that the Capitol bulding is more radioactive than a nuclear plant is legally allowed to be; that the only proven deaths from nuclear power were at the poorly designed Chernobyl plant, but it is a proven fact that over 50 people a day die from the pollution caused by coal and oil plants. They don't care that the heating power of a gram of uranium is similar to that of something like ten million tons of coal, that coal mining causes thousands of deaths, or that coal power plants require trainloads of fuel a day, and that nuclear power plants need a few truckloads per year. They also fail to realize the advantages of NTRs or NEPs, and that Yucca Mountain will cost $58 billion, mostly due to them (note that this is approximately three times the cost of a manned Mars mission).

Basically, if I wanted to stay safe from radiation, I would replace all coal plants with nuclear ones.

While nuclear power plants can have problems, in practice if safety regulations are followed they do not. A perfect example of a problem at a properly regulated plant was Three Mile Island. There was a major problem, and if the plant was not designed for safety people might have been hurt. But the containment structure prevented any radioactive release and protected the population of the area. The same cannot be said for coal and oil plants, whose pollution affects everyone in their area, including wildlife.

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"Too low they build, who build beneath the stars". - Edward Young, 1745

=D>

Brought a tear to me eye.

That's why we need this movement. But figuring out what a movement is supposed to do is the tricky part. 8-[ :-?

You should write a book! =D>

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Quaeso quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa veneris?

That could be a good start to the movement.

By the way, I was completely serious. Write a book. Who knows, it may actually change some peoples' minds.

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