5 ms·

Should Google Go Nuclear? Clean, cheap, nuclear power (no, really)

7 points by alex_c 18y ago

quasimojo 18y ago
the licensing for a new nuclear facility is measured in decades
ars 18y ago
tl;dw (Too long didn't watch.) But yes: they should.
- DaniFong 18y ago
  Okay then, I should point out that the talk is about nuclear fusion, not fission.
- comatose_kid 18y ago
  I watched it all last night - between the blurry slides and my dim memory of electromagnetics, much of it was over my head. But it was thought provoking, and a good example of a small team of bright adventurous people building something without waiting for 'permission'.
fallentimes 18y ago
Yes - Nuclear should be much more prevalent than it is.
rw 18y ago
Very old. We all wish the Polywell would be funded, but who will shell out the cash?
- DaniFong 18y ago
  According to wikipedia it was funded by this nonprofit, soliciting tax-deductable donations. http://emc2fusion.org/ http://emc2fusion.org/
comatose_kid 18y ago
Robert Bussard passed away last year of cancer at the age of 79. Check out his wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._Bussard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._Bussard
theantidote 18y ago
Here is the treehugger side of me, not the pragmatic side: where do we dispose of the waste? At the end of the day there's still waste created. Here's some pragmatism: Why spend any money investing in a new short term solution when we could spend the same amount on renewable energy that never runs out such as wind, solar, tidal and for the most part hydrogen? In another few hundred years we will start running low on uranium (edit: Wikipedia says it can be reprocessed and used an estimated thousands of years). I think if we're going to transition from oil and coal we shouldn't just go to a new stop-gap solution. The next energy source needs to be renewable so we never run into the same problem again.
- DaniFong 18y ago
  A 'properly designed' DT fusion reactor creates much less waste than an equivalently powered nuclear reactor, and moreover, the waste doesn't last as long: with a half life of a dozen years, not thousands. This means that you can store the waste just about anywhere where the higher isotopes of the surrounding material are stable, and keep it there for a hundred years, and cycle it out. Since there's not much waste, and you don't need to keep it contained effectively 'forever', there's not much storage that one needs in order to power the world at a steady state. Of course, the problem is what form a 'properly designed' DT reactor would take. This involves a materials problem that hasn't yet been solved: how to maintain structural integrity under massive magnetic and temperature stresses, while keeping enough lithium around to breed tritium out of outgoing neutrons. Not easy. There are other forms of fusion, so called 'aneutronic' fusion, that would avoid these materials and waste problems almost entirely, but in exchange for a much harder plasma physics problem. Bussard, the one talking in the video, believed that the Polywell might be able to achieve aneutronic fusion, between protons and boron-11. This is generally regarded as difficult; if the electrons and ions thermalize, they'll lose energy faster than the fusion could create it. The Polywell could conceivably avoid this though (I worked on a similar project in aneutronic fusion while I was at Princeton). There are two main technical reasons fusion power is still being pursued: it remains a possibility that it's cheaper at ultrahigh capacities (many GW) than coal or solar or wind (we don't really know, but it is in fact quite a possibility), and it's portable, meaning it could be used on submarines and ships (Bussard had funding from the US Navy, for example) and spacecraft. The third, of course, is that academic and engineering disciplines, and especially those federal funded, have astonishing momentum. :-)
mkn 18y ago
Wild. I just read today that the navy is funding EMC2 so that they can further their fusion research. I also watched, just today, this vid: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1518007279479871760&ei=KrwKSZq8N4TyqAPJsaiIDg&q=Lerner+fusion&hl=en http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1518007279479871760... , in which Eric Lerner talks about dense plasma focus fusion. He makes the point, towards the end, that DPF fusion is about (literally) a million times closer to obtaining fusion than even the Polywell scheme. The core of these DPF devices are about as big as your hand. I'm not putting down the Polywell scheme. I just thought the link to Lerner's talk was interesting as well. (It's also 64+ minutes long.)

7 points by alex_c 18y ago

quasimojo 18y ago

the licensing for a new nuclear facility is measured in decades

ars 18y ago

tl;dw (Too long didn't watch.) But yes: they should.

DaniFong 18y ago
Okay then, I should point out that the talk is about nuclear fusion, not fission.
comatose_kid 18y ago
I watched it all last night - between the blurry slides and my dim memory of electromagnetics, much of it was over my head. But it was thought provoking, and a good example of a small team of bright adventurous people building something without waiting for 'permission'.

fallentimes 18y ago

Yes - Nuclear should be much more prevalent than it is.

rw 18y ago

Very old. We all wish the Polywell would be funded, but who will shell out the cash?

DaniFong 18y ago
According to wikipedia it was funded by this nonprofit, soliciting tax-deductable donations. http://emc2fusion.org/ http://emc2fusion.org/

comatose_kid 18y ago

Robert Bussard passed away last year of cancer at the age of 79. Check out his wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._Bussard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._Bussard

theantidote 18y ago

Here is the treehugger side of me, not the pragmatic side: where do we dispose of the waste? At the end of the day there's still waste created. Here's some pragmatism: Why spend any money investing in a new short term solution when we could spend the same amount on renewable energy that never runs out such as wind, solar, tidal and for the most part hydrogen? In another few hundred years we will start running low on uranium (edit: Wikipedia says it can be reprocessed and used an estimated thousands of years). I think if we're going to transition from oil and coal we shouldn't just go to a new stop-gap solution. The next energy source needs to be renewable so we never run into the same problem again.

DaniFong 18y ago
A 'properly designed' DT fusion reactor creates much less waste than an equivalently powered nuclear reactor, and moreover, the waste doesn't last as long: with a half life of a dozen years, not thousands. This means that you can store the waste just about anywhere where the higher isotopes of the surrounding material are stable, and keep it there for a hundred years, and cycle it out. Since there's not much waste, and you don't need to keep it contained effectively 'forever', there's not much storage that one needs in order to power the world at a steady state. Of course, the problem is what form a 'properly designed' DT reactor would take. This involves a materials problem that hasn't yet been solved: how to maintain structural integrity under massive magnetic and temperature stresses, while keeping enough lithium around to breed tritium out of outgoing neutrons. Not easy. There are other forms of fusion, so called 'aneutronic' fusion, that would avoid these materials and waste problems almost entirely, but in exchange for a much harder plasma physics problem. Bussard, the one talking in the video, believed that the Polywell might be able to achieve aneutronic fusion, between protons and boron-11. This is generally regarded as difficult; if the electrons and ions thermalize, they'll lose energy faster than the fusion could create it. The Polywell could conceivably avoid this though (I worked on a similar project in aneutronic fusion while I was at Princeton). There are two main technical reasons fusion power is still being pursued: it remains a possibility that it's cheaper at ultrahigh capacities (many GW) than coal or solar or wind (we don't really know, but it is in fact quite a possibility), and it's portable, meaning it could be used on submarines and ships (Bussard had funding from the US Navy, for example) and spacecraft. The third, of course, is that academic and engineering disciplines, and especially those federal funded, have astonishing momentum. :-)

mkn 18y ago

Wild. I just read today that the navy is funding EMC2 so that they can further their fusion research. I also watched, just today, this vid: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1518007279479871760&ei=KrwKSZq8N4TyqAPJsaiIDg&q=Lerner+fusion&hl=en http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1518007279479871760... , in which Eric Lerner talks about dense plasma focus fusion. He makes the point, towards the end, that DPF fusion is about (literally) a million times closer to obtaining fusion than even the Polywell scheme. The core of these DPF devices are about as big as your hand. I'm not putting down the Polywell scheme. I just thought the link to Lerner's talk was interesting as well. (It's also 64+ minutes long.)