/sci/ - Science & Math

>>11680662
>Limited Uranium.
LMAO

>>11680668
>130 years based on 2017 use
>if the world was 100% uranium, it is estimated that we would run out of uranium in 20-30 years

okay you can stop pretended to be retarded now. or you are just a uranium mining shill nigger.

>>11680662
where the fuck are we gonna get all that lithium though? It's already not that cheap

>>11680678

>not consider that the cost of fuel is only 14% (of total cost). That means that the useful reserves could be several times greater just by raising the price.
>regenerative reactors use one or two orders of magnitude less uranium than current tech.
>by using bacteria and biomagnification there are tens or hundreds of times more extractable uranium in soil and seawater.

There is "useful" uranium for 300-10000 years of 100% fission energy. At least.

>fusion depends on lithium 6, relatively scarce.
>fusion is fission dependent
>fusion reactors are economically unfeasible

Fusion: a meme

>>11680678
I thought you meant made of uranium at first, took me a good while to realize you meant percentage of energy production.

>>11680729
>fusion will never get better

>>11680662
You're actually right, but until then we should use fission.

What is the connection between rabidly supporting nuclear power and being on the autism spectrum? Does anyone care to explain it to me?

>>11680729
>fusion is fission dependent
What? Do you mean for tritium production? Because fusion neutrons can be used to bombard Li-6. Fusion is fission-dependent in thermonuclear warheads, but not reactors as far as I'm aware.

>>11680834

Lemme know when it gets real anon, the energy crisis is now.

>>11680678
>What are breeder reactors

>>11681000
>but not reactors as far as I'm aware.
There are quite pessimistic papers (aka "more funds please") on the use of breeders with Li/Li-6/Li-6+Be. At least, without relying on uranium or uranium reactors.

While the CP-1 greatly simplified the design of reactors because it turned out to have a higher k than expected. With fussion reactors the "k" is increasingly pessimistic. The result is bigger and bigger (min size) reactors. And more complex breeders.

Fussionfags always "forget" that reactors are going to have to create extra hudrerds pounds of tritium to start new reactors or the same one after shutting down for a few days or months. Tritium continually decaying...

Thorium?

>>11680662
>Prove me wrong.
Cost of research, development and engineering.
There. Done it.

So ITER is going to start ignition in 2025. That's 5 years from now. When it proves that it can achieve a Q of 50, how will that change things?

>>11681987
>Fusion is a meme because I won't profit off of it
Probably the most jewish post I've seen in a while.

>>11682000
>problems of resource allocation are jewish trickery
You don't belong on /sci/
Please go back to /pol/

>>11681996
2035-2040 for D-T tests... being optimistic: Q10

2050-2060 for DEMO "Q25"

2070-2080 for Q100 (commercial target), being optimistic...

>>11680678
Deuterium is even rarer than uranium and takes assloads of power to make.
D2O is 1'000$/kg as a result.

Tritium needs lithium, and neutrons from fission and is 30k/g

Uranium is 40$/kg (3k/kg for pure 235)
And half the fission energy in a modern reactor comes from U238.

Then there's breeder reactors and thorium. (15$/kg) and all these release about the same energy.

And fission actually works.

>>11680662
>Anything less than nuclear is pointless
FTFY

Fission gets our energy costs down to post-scarcity levels, which allows us to economically build the number of D-D fusion reactors we'd need to replace them.

The ideal future is one where fissile elements are used in reactors that allow lightweight deep space missions, D-T fusion is used for early game fusion propulsion systems, and D-D fusion powers all our industries anywhere where solar is a meme (ie on the surface of any planet or moon, or in space beyond the asteroid belt. Solar is actually perfectly viable as long as you're in the inner solar system and have constant exposure to the Sun).

By the way, with fission reactors using a breeder cycle, continental and upper mantle crust on Earth contains enough uranium and thorium by mass that every kilogram of rock contains about 20x the useful energy content of that of a chunk of anthracite coal. Breeder reactors let you power the planet using superabundant rocks that otherwise has effectively no value, and since the fuel extraction process already pays for itself, you can tweak it very slightly and also extract all of the rare earth metals and copper and silver and whatever other elements you want at the same time, meaning the cost of these materials drops down to basically zero, just like the energy.

Never forget that while D-D fusion lets you power everything using 1/4000th of the hydrogen on Earth, fission breeders let you power everything by using any igneous rock on the planet, and as an added bonus extracts every elemental resource along the way as a byproduct. Finally, this trick with fission breeders works on Mercury, Venus, the Moon, asteroids, and Mars, as well as on every solid object beyond the asteroid belt where the rocky mantle is within reach through the ice sheets.

>>11680662
You might not be aware but SOLAR IS FUSION!

>>11682076
>Tritium needs lithium, and neutrons from fission
It just needs neutrons, they don't need to be from fission. Are you unaware that both D-D fusion and D-T fusion produce assloads of neutron flux? In fact almost every fusion fuel combination produces MORE neutron radiation per megawatt than fission.

>Then there's breeder reactors and thorium. (15$/kg) and all these release about the same energy.
They release about the same energy per fission, yes, but more importantly they release between 100 and 200 times as much energy per fuel mass loaded into the reactor. This is because they let you achieve ~100% fuel burn-up, unlike non breeder reactors where the fuel can only be used until fission products build up enough to poison the reaction and the fuel must be removed as 'waste'. It's still got 99% to 99.5% of its nuclear potential energy, but that 0.5% to 1% fission-product-ratio is too much to keep the fission reaction self sustaining any more.

The trick to fission breeders is cheap fuel reprocessing, and ideally you'd have CONTINUOUS fuel reprocessing, so that fission products are removed as soon as they're made and controlling the reaction rate of the fuel becomes extremely easy. You can also ramp the power setting up and down as fast and as often as you want without having to worry about xenon poisoning killing your reactor for a day and a half, so your reactor can now respond to load just as easily as a natural gas turbine. Cheap fuel reprocessing is also what lets the scenario I described here >>11682087 to become a reality; it lets you get ~2000 times the energy out of the fuel as you used to mine, transport, and concentrate that fuel (for reference coal power is about a 50x return on input, and it requires almost no processing beyond mining crushing and transport to the furnace).

>And fission actually works.
This is the biggest point to make, of course. We can't be fucking with fusion for 100 years, we need to conquer space before China.

>>11682101
And it's not viable unless you are in space where it shines 100% of the time. Funny you post a solar concentration power plant, the least efficient and generally worst type of solar generation plant. Those things burn thousands of cubic meters of natural gas every morning to get the thermal salt up to operating temperature, and then they only produce power for around 70% of the time the Sun is up, meaning they actually contribute to the grid only ~35% of the time.

>>11682118
>D-D fusion
negative net energy balance (hard to confine)

>D-T fusion
k = 1, it dont multiply neutrons, in fact, k < 0.9 because tritium loses (metal absorption, recovery not totaly efficient) when burn-up is low (<10%, ITER ~0.4%)

>every fusion fuel combination produces MORE neutron radiation per megawatt than fission
And that is terrible.

>>11682118
>CONTINUOUS fuel reprocessing,
Tritium needs CONTINUOUS breeder and fuel (not burned) reprocessing

>>11680662
whats stopping scientists from using mitocondria as power source to replace batteries?

Fission isn't a meme, but NIMBY retards have made it very hard to implement in the west.

>>11681908
Couldnt you simply run a DD breeder that pumps out extra tritium to top off your main reactor?

>>11682237

Fuck it, just torture eels

>>11681987
It's more than that, it's the uncertainty of the result.
Governments and companies can spend relatively easy huge amounts of money if they can estimate beforehand a positive result.

>>11682356
>DD breeder
No. D-T already is hard enough to get it economically feasible. D-D is 100 times "harder"/"slower". That means net energy gain is negative or it's necessary to use a much higher plasma density, the hardest part. Even so energy gain is not secured. DT is the best fusion reaction by far.

>>11682125
Not true, modern solar-thermal plants store heat and run all the time.
So far "fusion" reactors just waste money and energy, never produced a single watt and never will, it's just a scam

>>11682363
wut?!

>>11680678
this is only true if we cant find more uranium and new ways to find and gather uranium which we will its the same logic retarded people saying we will run out of oil.