Out of Pod Experience

Also in Djibouti...

How do you know that the shapeshifting lizardmen just aren't shapeshifting into mossad sharks in an attempt to aim the spotlight away from them?

I believe they are falsely advertising... should have called it Not-Quite-So-Hot fusion

Not even enough

I cant believe its not cold fusion?

We all missed our true calling in being horrible at marketing and advertising.

I hope that Mercury Fusion becomes an actual thing

Is this another "Development X right around the corner!" thing, only to be never heard of again?

So. Thorium. My nifty friend thorium...

Three, maybe four, times more plentiful than Uranium. Fuel-wise, about 200 times more energy-dense than Uranium. Not weaponisable (unless you're talking 'dirty bombs'). Fission daughter daughter products are generally shorter-lived than Uranium processes (albeit with MUCH higher initial specific activity) - Still, we're talking human timeframes; storage for maybe a thousand years for most daughter products, instead of effectively 'for eternity.' In some molten salt designs, daughter products can be added back into the fuel and 'burned' a second, or even third time. That's an amazing efficiency advantage.

Thorium can use a range of working fluids - Though light water and molten salt are the two most useful. Indeed, the molten salt design was estimated (three years ago) to potentially be as much as 30% cheaper than Uranium-fueld light-water reactors. Realistically, probably more like 10-15% savings. Still, nothing at which to sneeze!

Thorium 232 is not fissile in its own right - you can't accidentally create a super-critical mass. Uraninium and Plutonium have had that happen repeatedly.
BUT! The reaction chain produces U-233, which *is* fissile. Can't be helped - It's an integral part fo the power reaction. U-233 makes bombs every bit as effective as Pu-239. In fact, the very act of reprocessing Thorium fuel to re-add daughter products specifically means separating out the U-233.
Ooops.

Mixing U-233 with U-238 solves that problem - until you realize that now you're making Pu-239.
Worse, it's easier to seperate the fissile fuels in a Thorium-chain plant.

Now, if proliferation isn't your concern, well, we can ignore all that. The design is still really tempting, yes?
Maybe not...

There are still some daughter products which will defy human timescales and presnet stoarge issues with Biblical timeframes... Technetium-99, for instance, has a half-life of about 200K years. Which means a full million years for it to decay to negligibility. Th-232 has a half-life of 1.4BILLION years... Creating radio-daughters all the while. Better not stockpile your fuel - extract it strictly in the precise quantities needed. Which makes extraction much more expensive. Costs rise... Now, the Thorium has been sitting in the grounds all these billions of years, right? Which means the mining process itself is a radioactive process - The surrounding ground is FULL of dughter product. That means that ANY extraction is going to be crapping-up equipment, countryside, and workers.


Remember where I mentioned higher 'specific activities,' above? Another daughter product is U-232. That crap is HOT!
Get eevn a small amount of that in your lungs, you're dead. Which means fuel preperation is going to require seriously pricy controls... Costs continue to rise.

Thorium is interesting, but ultimately, it's even more expensive to work with than less-efficient Uranium. We'd be better off going back to fast-breeder designs, and dealing with the costs of non-proliferation controls.

there's already a stable, verified, clean, renewable near-perfect fusion engine that oil companies don't want you to know about.

it's renewable and sustainable to the tune of 5 billion years

we only have access to 0.000000045% of it. but just one hour of that access is equal to the world population's annual energy use.

it does emit radiation... such as Gamma, X-ray. . but the bad radiation can be managed with magnetic fields to isolate usable heat.

the best part is the fusion engine is already isolated properly to be cold to the touch. in turn, it's difficult to create enough of a cold sink to make good use of it.

but you get what you asked for... near-perfect, cold fusion.

one issue is, a few hundred years from now when the earth's magnetic poles reverse polarity, the effects of this energy source will be rather harsh for a period of 30 years-ish. cancer rates will spike--human DNA doesn't hold up well to Gamma and X-rays.

link here

the more you know, bitches