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Most waste doesn't give off very much heat unless you get enough of it close together to get a chain reaction going. A lump of stuff radioactive enough to kill
by tlb 4y ago
Most waste doesn't give off very much heat unless you get enough of it close together to get a chain reaction going. A lump of stuff radioactive enough to kill you in minutes barely produces enough heat to get warm. So you have to get a chain reaction going if you want to drive a steam turbine with it.
But if you get it a little too close together, it goes boom. So for all the reasons that nuclear reactors are expensive, a waste heat generator would be larger and at least as complex.
- diamondlovesyou 4y ago> But if you get it a little too close together, it goes boom. It won't go boom. One of the difficulties (of many) of the Manhattan project was that it was really really difficult to get fissile material together fast enough to cause a significant explosion. Those conditions are impossible in reactors. What does happen is that gaseous hydrogen is generated and that subsequently explodes.
- ncmncm 4y agoChernobyl made an entirely big enough boom for any practical purpose.