quote:

ORIGINAL: BenevolentM

What you wrote MercTech suggests that we should burn the low level radioactive waste. Are the isotopes released by coal as harmful to life as contained in the low level radioactive waste?

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ORIGINAL: MercTech

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ORIGINAL: Marcus000

In the end, fission might end up being the cleaner and cheaper option. But the Koch brothers and other oil barons will try to hinder any progress that makes us not dependent on oil and gas. And yes, climate change is due to human activity and the booming of world economy and the global rise of the middle class. Simple scientifically proven fact.

An article in the INPO Journal (Institute of Nuclear Power Operators - www.inpo.info ) made a good point several years ago. (Numbers were documented for 1993)

Nuclear power plants generated 7,000,000,000 (7 billion) tons of low level radioactive waste a year. All of this waste is accounted for, controlled, and shipped for proper disposal.
Based on the percentage of pitchblende (a Uranium ore) and the coal usage for electrical generation from Coal industry figures and deducting the residual radioactive material left in the "clinkers"; the Coal power industry puts 350,000,000 (350 million) tons of radioactive material out the stack each week. (emphasis is mine)

Let's do the math. Assuming 50 weeks of operation a year (they do have down time for maintenance) that would be 350M X 50 weeks = 17.5 billion tons of radioactive material put out the stack of coal burning power plants each year.

Oh, yes, since the radioactive material in coal is "natural" there is no limit or requirement for monitoring.

Yep, nuclear is expensive to build but cleaner and the second cheapest way to generate electricity after hydroelectric.

(BTW - 30+ years dealing with radioactive material)

quote:

ORIGINAL: DomKen

quote:

ORIGINAL: MercTech

quote:


It may have made refueling easy but has now created an environmental catastrophe that may never get fully cleaned up. Not a trade off I find acceptable.

Location of a spent fuel pool is totally irrelevant to the cleanup situation. More like harping on the type of radio in a car that was wrecked.

The problems at Fukushima stem from a loss of cooling for a protracted amount of time. The design flaw that caused this was considering the placing of equipment and environmental hardening was sufficient for location on a seacoast where devastating tsunamis could happen.

If the pools had not been on top of the reactor vessels they might not have drained and might not have been involved at all. For instance if the pools had been in ground.

quote:

ORIGINAL: DomKen
I'm not confusing anything.

Take an internal combustion engine, you burn a hydrocarbon mixed with air to get an expanding gas to do some work (move pistons or spin a turbine). However you also get a lot of lost energy. That's why the engine gets hot. It absorbs some of that waste energy.

Now for fusion, This link shows the process in graphic form
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:FusionintheSun.svg

Now notice each of the Y and v in the reaction. Those gamma ray and neutrino emissions are energy lost from the reaction. Of course a lot more energy is lost from the reaction, we call it sunlight. But the gamma rays and neutrinos demonstrate that the reaction is not 100% efficient. Some of what goes in does not come out the other side.

Now what does this mean for doing fusion on Earth? It means that barring some sort of unprecedented breakthrough a sustained fusion reaction takes more input energy than it can produce. Which is obvious from the 2nd law. The reason an internal combustion engine gets around this is the engine is not a closed system. The fuel is itself energetic. For a fusion plant to work you either need a fuel source that fuses without a huge amount of input energy, unknown and probably physically impossible, or a way to create an environment where fusion will occur without pumping in a huge amount of energy, i.e. create a deep gravity well which at present is also impossible. So a few guys continue to mess around with lasers pumping hydrogen in magnetic bottles and they write breathless papers about improving their efficiency by tenths of a percent. Go read those papers about what the total efficiency is and you'll see that they are no where near a useful power plant.

quote:

ORIGINAL: epiphiny43

The fusion plant itself is not the closed system. The humanly accessible planet is. The energy of subatomic particle bonding making up the atoms is partially reduced, and the extra energy is released. The conditions to make this happen are extreme and difficult. Note the claim that the System produced an excess of energy over it's input, not that energy was extracted from the fusion of atoms. That's 17k joules Extra above the return of the 500 mj input. Which you are saying can't happen. But it did. The difficulty is a system that does this often enough to be economically significant and in scale to be useful industrially.
Entropy is still present as the helium result has less energy than the original deuterium but there is Useful net power output of the system economically from the fusion transformation, when it's worked out. Power plants, like all self organizing life, are Temporarily and Locally reversed entropy, not violations of the Second Law. When you run out of deuterium, your power plant has 'flattened' that energy gradient you were exploiting. The closed system is the larger environment including the fuel source, all energy and matter input and output and the rest state of each after the process, basically the biosphere and extractable geology of the planet. Just as with fossil fuel plants.
Which is the distinction of solar heat or photovoltaic systems, they include the Sun in the closed system for several advantages.
What isn't usually considered (Caught this in a great 1st year Physics back in the middle '60s) is the total heat output of people and support systems (consumer, transportation, food and housing) we construct on the planet. No matter where we get the energy, civilization's heat output will stress the biosphere and probably limit population well below it's present if we want a higher standard of living (Which nicely dovetails with total energy use and output into the environment.) than present in the 1st world for all. Mature technologies may greatly reduce the excess heat dump from manufacturing, concrete for building (transportation seems a constant) and just communication/calculation (Not insignificant power consumption already) but just the Bodies on the planet eventually overheat the biosphere. 15 billion bodies was one back of the envelope calculation back then.
I'm skeptical any Tokamak fusion scheme will work well enough. The math calculations of plasma physics aren't mature enough yet to optimize our devices. Someone is bound to invent better ways of confining hot plasma with lower heat losses to the container and more efficient ways of energizing the power sections of the plasma. NO ends of laser power or efficiency are in sight, for one. Orders of magnitude improvements have happened this decade? Progress is continuing, no show stoppers yet other than funding are on the horizon.

quote:

In other words, these ferocious conditions almost three times denser than the center of the sun release the same amount of energy embodied by a downhill skier going 58 kilometers per hour (by Hurricane's calculations). All told, only about 1 percent of the energy from the lasers ends up in the fuel, which then pumps out 17,000 joules’ worth of energy, or less than the energy needed to make the DT fuel in the first place.

quote:

Scientists remain a long way from what's known as ignition: the point at which fusion of any kind releases more energy than was consumed to start it. And the method used to produce this result is unlikely to create the conditions needed to reach that goal.

quote:

ORIGINAL: MercTech

quote:

ORIGINAL: DomKen
I'm not confusing anything.

Take an internal combustion engine, you burn a hydrocarbon mixed with air to get an expanding gas to do some work (move pistons or spin a turbine). However you also get a lot of lost energy. That's why the engine gets hot. It absorbs some of that waste energy.

Now for fusion, This link shows the process in graphic form
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:FusionintheSun.svg

Now notice each of the Y and v in the reaction. Those gamma ray and neutrino emissions are energy lost from the reaction. Of course a lot more energy is lost from the reaction, we call it sunlight. But the gamma rays and neutrinos demonstrate that the reaction is not 100% efficient. Some of what goes in does not come out the other side.

Now what does this mean for doing fusion on Earth? It means that barring some sort of unprecedented breakthrough a sustained fusion reaction takes more input energy than it can produce. Which is obvious from the 2nd law. The reason an internal combustion engine gets around this is the engine is not a closed system. The fuel is itself energetic. For a fusion plant to work you either need a fuel source that fuses without a huge amount of input energy, unknown and probably physically impossible, or a way to create an environment where fusion will occur without pumping in a huge amount of energy, i.e. create a deep gravity well which at present is also impossible. So a few guys continue to mess around with lasers pumping hydrogen in magnetic bottles and they write breathless papers about improving their efficiency by tenths of a percent. Go read those papers about what the total efficiency is and you'll see that they are no where near a useful power plant.

Actually you are. Entropy has nothing to do with friction losses or hysteresis losses or ancillary radiation in a nuclear reaction. Entropy deals with closed systems. CLOSED systems. Any time you have an input and and output to the system it is no longer closed.

quote:

A fusion reaction has electrical and matter input and an output of hot plasma. The energy output is from the energy released when two hydrogen nuclei combine to make a helium nucleus. Helium has a lower mass defect than two hydrogen nuclei and the energy from the difference in mass comes off as radiation. The energy gain is the process is from converting mass to energy.

quote:

Controlled fusion has been done and continues to be done since the 1970s. The problem has been getting the fusion reaction to generate more energy (as measured by the hot plasma output) than was needed to power the magnetic bottle, inject the matter, and use lasers to trigger the first fusion.

At no time are the entropy losses inherent in any reaction significant or germane to discussion of getting a usable fusion power plant developed.

quote:

ORIGINAL: DomKen

Entropy and the 2nd law has everything to do with friction. What do you think friction is? It is a loss of energy.

quote:

A fusion reaction has electrical and matter input and an output of hot plasma. The energy output is from the energy released when two hydrogen nuclei combine to make a helium nucleus. Helium has a lower mass defect than two hydrogen nuclei and the energy from the difference in mass comes off as radiation. The energy gain is the process is from converting mass to energy.

quote:

Controlled fusion has been done and continues to be done since the 1970s. The problem has been getting the fusion reaction to generate more energy (as measured by the hot plasma output) than was needed to power the magnetic bottle, inject the matter, and use lasers to trigger the first fusion.

At no time are the entropy losses inherent in any reaction significant or germane to discussion of getting a usable fusion power plant developed.

quote:


In thermodynamics, entropy (usual symbol S) is a measure of the number of specific ways in which a thermodynamic system may be arranged, often taken to be a measure of disorder, or a measure of progressing towards thermodynamic equilibrium. The entropy of an isolated system never decreases, because isolated systems spontaneously evolve towards thermodynamic equilibrium, which is the state of maximum entropy.

quote:


The second law of thermodynamics states that in general the total entropy of any system will not decrease other than by increasing the entropy of some other system. Hence, in a system isolated from its environment, the entropy of that system will tend not to decrease. It follows that heat will not flow from a colder body to a hotter body without the application of work (the imposition of order) to the colder body.

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ORIGINAL: mnottertail

unless the thing could be faster than light itself it must obey laws that are pedantically espoused by high school wanna be physics professors, simply because they are true.

quote:

ORIGINAL: MercTech

quote:

ORIGINAL: mnottertail
unless the thing could be faster than light itself it must obey laws that are pedantically espoused by high school wanna be physics professors, simply because they are true.

The only thing I know faster than light are relativistic electrons...

quote:

ORIGINAL: mnottertail

Let us be perfectly punctilious here, they are not moving faster than the speed of light just faster than the speed of light IN THAT MEDIUM.

If anything moves faster than the speed of light.......anything....then it just does not exist for us. Period, end of fuckin joke, didnt happen, we cant deal with it, see it, hear it, measure it, use it, or know about it.

Just .......no, can't do it. It can't happen in our world, like having a threesome with committed lesbians, and you are gonna have them both gobbling your dick, it aint of this world, and not happening. Not ever.

quote:

ORIGINAL: DomKen

quote:

ORIGINAL: MercTech

quote:

ORIGINAL: DomKen
I'm not confusing anything.

Take an internal combustion engine, you burn a hydrocarbon mixed with air to get an expanding gas to do some work (move pistons or spin a turbine). However you also get a lot of lost energy. That's why the engine gets hot. It absorbs some of that waste energy.

Now for fusion, This link shows the process in graphic form
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:FusionintheSun.svg

Now notice each of the Y and v in the reaction. Those gamma ray and neutrino emissions are energy lost from the reaction. Of course a lot more energy is lost from the reaction, we call it sunlight. But the gamma rays and neutrinos demonstrate that the reaction is not 100% efficient. Some of what goes in does not come out the other side.

Now what does this mean for doing fusion on Earth? It means that barring some sort of unprecedented breakthrough a sustained fusion reaction takes more input energy than it can produce. Which is obvious from the 2nd law. The reason an internal combustion engine gets around this is the engine is not a closed system. The fuel is itself energetic. For a fusion plant to work you either need a fuel source that fuses without a huge amount of input energy, unknown and probably physically impossible, or a way to create an environment where fusion will occur without pumping in a huge amount of energy, i.e. create a deep gravity well which at present is also impossible. So a few guys continue to mess around with lasers pumping hydrogen in magnetic bottles and they write breathless papers about improving their efficiency by tenths of a percent. Go read those papers about what the total efficiency is and you'll see that they are no where near a useful power plant.

Actually you are. Entropy has nothing to do with friction losses or hysteresis losses or ancillary radiation in a nuclear reaction. Entropy deals with closed systems. CLOSED systems. Any time you have an input and and output to the system it is no longer closed.

Entropy and the 2nd law has everything to do with friction. What do you think friction is? It is a loss of energy.

quote:

A fusion reaction has electrical and matter input and an output of hot plasma. The energy output is from the energy released when two hydrogen nuclei combine to make a helium nucleus. Helium has a lower mass defect than two hydrogen nuclei and the energy from the difference in mass comes off as radiation. The energy gain is the process is from converting mass to energy.

And by definition some of that energy must be lost. Correct?

quote:

Controlled fusion has been done and continues to be done since the 1970s. The problem has been getting the fusion reaction to generate more energy (as measured by the hot plasma output) than was needed to power the magnetic bottle, inject the matter, and use lasers to trigger the first fusion.

At no time are the entropy losses inherent in any reaction significant or germane to discussion of getting a usable fusion power plant developed.

And if there are no losses in the system then why not feed the out put into the input?

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ORIGINAL: Phydeaux
Ken, you keep jumping up and down and insisting 1 + 1 = Pink.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Phydeaux

quote:

ORIGINAL: mnottertail

Let us be perfectly punctilious here, they are not moving faster than the speed of light just faster than the speed of light IN THAT MEDIUM.

If anything moves faster than the speed of light.......anything....then it just does not exist for us. Period, end of fuckin joke, didnt happen, we cant deal with it, see it, hear it, measure it, use it, or know about it.

Just .......no, can't do it. It can't happen in our world, like having a threesome with committed lesbians, and you are gonna have them both gobbling your dick, it aint of this world, and not happening. Not ever.

Actually, that's incorrect.

Einstein's equation merely says nothing can be accelerated faster than the speed of light. Things going faster than light initially are an edge case. Physics has postulate that such particles existed, and for a while it was thought that tachyons were such a case.

Then it was found to be a measurement error.

But the existence of faster than light isn't completely ruled out.

In fact physics also has an edge wave formula that defines the ftl interface and the performance of particles at that interface. But as far as I know its theory.

quote:

ORIGINAL: DomKen

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ORIGINAL: epiphiny43

DomKen, normally we argue the same sides. What happened to your physics? If the Sun works and fusion bombs work, there is no fundamental reason controlled fusion won't either. Human ingenuity and resources to throw at a difficult technical problem are the limits, not fundamental laws.
Would you mind stopping saying a fusion plant Can't produce more energy than it takes to run it and give ONE reason why? (Besides it being "Obvious"?) Getting to sound like a playing card hitting bike spokes, with about as convincing a result. Not like you at all.

Ok, do you understand thermodynamics and entropy? Really?





Now consider what is a fusion power plant supposed to be? We're going to take hydrogen, probably deuterium but that's just an isotope of hydrogen that's a little easier to fuse, and we're going to excite it somehow, IOW get it to a plasma state, and constrain it so that it fuses and when it does fuse it will release all that wonderful energy which we can gather and use.

Now for the problems, how do you get the hydrogen excited? Firing a laser at it seems the consensus. To fuse the 170 micrograms of hydrogen isotopes discussed above the lasers were fed 500 megajoules of electricity. And the fusion only released 17k joules. That's right 500 megajoules input to get 17 kilojoules out.

You see, in most engines or power plants we "burn" a fuel that is storing a readily released energy in either chemical, potential or radioactive type. Even in fission we just put the fissile material together it gets hot and we let it boil water, in the most common reactor type, but in a fusion reactor we'd have to force the reaction to happen which would take input energy and once we start doing that we're not going to come out ahead. It would be like pumping water up hill to run a water mill.

And then add in the power to make the fuel pellets, to cool them, to actually gather the energy and you see that the system. But always keep in mind the rule of entropy. No closed system can come out ahead.

quote:

ORIGINAL: mnottertail

quote:

ORIGINAL: Phydeaux

quote:

ORIGINAL: mnottertail

Let us be perfectly punctilious here, they are not moving faster than the speed of light just faster than the speed of light IN THAT MEDIUM.

If anything moves faster than the speed of light.......anything....then it just does not exist for us. Period, end of fuckin joke, didnt happen, we cant deal with it, see it, hear it, measure it, use it, or know about it.

Just .......no, can't do it. It can't happen in our world, like having a threesome with committed lesbians, and you are gonna have them both gobbling your dick, it aint of this world, and not happening. Not ever.

Actually, that's incorrect.

Einstein's equation merely says nothing can be accelerated faster than the speed of light. Things going faster than light initially are an edge case. Physics has postulate that such particles existed, and for a while it was thought that tachyons were such a case.

Then it was found to be a measurement error.

But the existence of faster than light isn't completely ruled out.

In fact physics also has an edge wave formula that defines the ftl interface and the performance of particles at that interface. But as far as I know its theory.

no, incorrect. The speed of light is constant, in all directions, simultaneously. Accelerated frames cannot be distinguished from gravity, nor rest.

done deal. nothing moves faster than the speed of light. it is all measurement incorrectness. if it moves faster than the speed of light, it does not exist for us, not ever.
how would we measure something faster than the speed of light? that is the smallest measurement we have. If it cannot be measured by the speed of light it is simply a what the fuck. doesnt exist in our material world. Dark energy could be stuff faster than the speed of light..........who knows, many things may move faster than the speed of light, but not in the world we inhabit.

Done deal, over no argument, no cavil. Just like time before time. not something we can deal with. didnt happen. doesnt happen. wont happen.
Time as we understand it does not flow from present to past.

Einstein said no MATERIAL object can exceed the speed of light. (time would run backward if it did).

He wanted his theory named invariants theory (guess what the invariant was?) not relativity theory but everyone focused on the difference in clocks not on the invariant.

actually relativity was two theories interrelated.

Special theory
General theory

easy peg to remember
Special theory S=speed
General theory G=gravity

You are absolutely incorrect. Thus endeth the lesson.

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ORIGINAL: DomKen

quote:

ORIGINAL: Kirata

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ORIGINAL: DomKen

I'll repeat this for you, a fusion power plant is not viable since it will always take more power input than you can get out of it. The only caveat to that is the possibility that someday we may find a way to manipulate gravity that doesn't need energy to do it.

Well I certainly hope that you intend to advise the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, the University of Wisconsin Fusion Technology Institute, and the countless other institutes and laboratories wasting money on this frivolous pursuit. And I think it would be a commendable gesture of international goodwill if you would share your superior knowledge with the signatories to the European Fusion Development Agreement as well.

K.

The DoE is still funding cold fusion too. I assume even you don't believe that stupid shit works.

quote:

ORIGINAL: mnottertail

except that in the real world it kinda does.

thats one of the reasons it is taking us so long to find out if there actually and definitively is a higgs boson.

Let me use small words for you.

How to make a million dollars.

First, get a million dollars.

You aint gonna start fusion on the kitchen table with strike anywhere matches and some baking soda.