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This topic is offered for NewMars members who might wish to consolidate some of the many discussions about nuclear energy storage and retrieval that are scattered around the forum archives.
Existing topics and posts cover nuclear fission, nuclear fusion and probably related topics ...
(th)
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This post is reserved for links about fission.
The planet has several hundred nuclear fission reactors in operation, and the number may be as great as 1000 if military ones are included.
Fission Reactors exist in many forms, of which the Light Water Pressurized Reactor is the most common by far.
Heavy Water reactors were developed in Canada (I understand) because they had Heavy Water, and they were denied access to US technology after World War II.
Gas moderated reactors were developed in the UK because they had neither Heavy Water nor access to US knowledge after World War II.
Variations are numerous. Calliban has detailed a number of designs, and contributed design concepts of his own.
(th)
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This post is reserved for links about fusion ....
The forum contains many topics and numerous posts about all kinds of fusion technologies.
I'll put hybrid systems here as well, since Calliban has suggested several of those.
(th)
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This post is reserved for links to stored energy using fission or fusion (or both)...
This category has numerous entries in this forum, primarily in the lower power category.
We have a topic dedicated to the Nickel-63 isotope to Copper-63 transmutation, for example.
(th)
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I think there are limited practical options for storing energy using strong nuclear force. We can induce radioactivity by exposing materials to a neutron flux. That radioactivity then represents a steady and predictable energy release. There are lots of potential applications for radioisotopes, including harvesting their decay energy through RTGs and betavoltaics. For energy applications of radioactivity, the most promissing approach seems to to harvest long-lived fission products from spent nuclear fuel. A large nuclear reactor produces about one metric tonne of these each year.
Strontium-90 looks promissing for energy applications. We have discussed using it as a power source for the large interplanetary ship. Once we have a nuclear industry on Mars, we can start reprocessing and putting radioisotopes to use. Ceasium-137 can be used as a heat source, but requires shielding due to gamma emissions. So this works best in static applications. Technetium-99 is an excellent catalyst, especially for dehydrogenation reactions producing alkenes from alcohols. It is also useful for inhibiting corrosion of steels. Ruthenium and palladium fission products have uses as catalysts. This tells us something about how we will deal with radioactive waste on Mars. Most likely, we will seperate the isotopes and put them to use.
Last edited by Calliban (2024-01-24 04:40:37)
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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For Calliban re #5
Thank you for your support of this new topic. Your post #5 captures the essence of what I have learned so far, in study of Nickel-63 and Tritium. Both would be excellent energy storage candidates, because they have useful half lives and because they emit beta particles. However, it turns out that it is exceedingly difficult to make these isotopes.
I am looking for comparable mateials that can be made in quantities on the order of a metric ton per day, and far beyond that level to build up a meaningful industry.
As you have predicted, these isotopes will remain of minor significance as things stand.
Your suggestions for practical use of other isotopes generated by fission seem to me well worth documenting further, and I hope this topic will provide a venue for recording your thoughts about how this might be done.
I have designed this topic to have potential value as an information repository. We can use the opening posts to hold an index to help future readers to find specific subjects quickly.
The forum search tool maintains a table of words used in posts and titles, and the search tool works reasonably well, but I think having an index will help to avoid the problem of clutter.
The specific problem that I am seeing, in looking for ways to make useful isotopes such as Nickel-63 and Tritium, is that (at present) human beings do not have a way to make specific isotopes efficiently. Our present production depends entirely upon random activity, and in the case of Tritium, the Deuterium atom appears to have a particular reluctance to accept a third neutron, because two neutrons defend their perch next to their proton with vigor.
In order for these isotopes to be produced in quantity, the random activity we use today must be replaced by precision placement of neutrons with precisely the right energy moving in precisely the right direction in great numbers.
How this will be accomplished remains an exercise for the reader.
As a side note ... the problem of efficient modification of nuclei is exactly the problem to be solved for Boron-11+P fusion ... In this case, the problem to be solved is efficient non-random delivery of a Proton to the Boron-11 nucleus. A great deal of work has been done in pursuit of this attractive fusion method, because the benefits are significant, and the supply of Boron-11 is significant. Unfortunately, the present method is based upon random collisions, so little has been achieved.
The same issue is slowing achievement of fusion of Deuterium and other nuclei in the small baryon count family. The present approach is to try to encourage random events, and Nature is resisting with all the tools put in place billions of years ago.
A method of efficiently arranging the marriage of nuclei who most emphatically do NOT want to marry would greatly improve performance in all of these initiatives.
As a reminder for future readers, Nature solved this problem long ago, by enlisting gravity to encourage mass marriages of nuclei. Potentially humans may learn how to manage gravity at a small enough scale so that an efficient fusion system may be possible, but managing a small black hole (for example) is also an exercise for the reader.
(th)
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Here is one example of a useful radioisotope produced by neutron bombardment.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt-60
One could say that Co-60 is an energy source. But the gamma rays it produces as it decays into Ni-60, make it useful for all sorts of applications. It is used in weld radiography, cancer treatment and sterilisation of medical equipment. Cs-137 is sometimes used in these applications as well.
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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