I might make China my religion
The high-energy neutrons from fusion reactions will trigger fission in surrounding materials, increasing energy output while potentially reducing nuclear waste.
China is achieving high efficency Fusion early!
By using it to supercharge fission plants
Nuclear fission is not as dangerous as people think it is. Nuclear powerplants are built like fortresses, there are many protocols for safety and a well built and well planned nuclear powerplant will not bring any casualties. The alternative on the other hand (fossil fuels), kills more people every year than nuclear energy in its whole history. If you asked me if I’d rather live next to a nuclear power plant or a coal/oil based thermoelectric, I’d choose the one who gives out a lesser radiation dose, the nuclear powerplant
It’s the catastrophic failures that leave long lasting multi generational environmental deviststion. The more fission plants we have, the higher the risk of one going. We live in the days where 1 in 500 year events are happening on the norm and massive state actors actively target nukes as policy. Fukushima happened because despite the “it would never happen here that bad” happened even with multiple redundancies and built like a fortress. Every fission plant made increases the chances of another catastrophic failure. It’s a gamble with worsening odds that I feel is a blind spot.
I applaud China in innovating, but fission plants give me red flags as they pile on the risk. Then piping a neutron stream into one seems even more risky. I would to develop energy storage and splitting hydrogen and oxygen. At least if a hydrogen / oxygen plant goes it won’t make exclusion zones or poison the water supply.
Can you imagine if Fukushima happened on the shores of Lake Michigan rather the Pacific Ocean? It would contaminate the drinking water and economic lifeblood for millions. Many see fission as a quick fix, but I feel they overlook the odds when that kind of money (and there’s a huge nuke lobby) for these plants could be used in developing less risky solutions that would benifet us in the long term goal of becoming a Type 1 and beyond civilization.
I thought we would have learned after Fukushima fission was not the way to go.These are actually far, far safer than any pure fission plant. The nice thing about these fusion-fission plants is they can be designed to be completely and utterly meltdown proof. Regular fission plants have a self-sustaining fission reaction; the plant is designed to slow the reaction down and keep it under control. With a fusion-fission plant, you can design it the opposite way. You design the fission part to be sub-critical. You use a fission fuel that cannot maintain a self-sustaining fission reaction. You design it so that the fission part is only able to maintain a reaction if it has a giant neutron beam pointed at it. And that neutron flux is provided by the fusion part of the reactor.
If anything at all goes wrong in the plant, all you have to do is cut off power to the fusion reactor. The fusion component of the reactor cannot itself make net power; it consumes electricity to keep running. So you just it off, the neutron flux collapses, and the fission portion is unable to keep its reaction going.
Yeah yeah rebuilt the Titanic and this time it really is unsinkable. They told us that before and it still happened.
Either the beam can’t be turned off fast enough. A crack developed in the shield. The tripple redundant backups had an evironmental anomaly occur that didn’t think would happen in 500 years. What are the odds?
Odds get worse every year with every build. Fission is not a sustainable or safe no matter how they market / lobby the technology. Fukushima was extremely over engineered. Sea walls, multipe redundant backup gens high up on a hill. Scram procedures and a negative coefficient of reactivity to stop it from going Cherynobol, and it still hasn’t been cleaned up over a decade later, and it still had a massive release into the largest ocean. What if Fukushima happened in say Lake Michigan instead?
After all the stink China made about Fukushima, I really am suprised they still went with fission. They are setting themselves up IMO and they have a lot more people to worry about than Japan. Oh well I know I’m in the minority here. I just don’t see why others just blindly go with it. There’s a smart group here. They get the dangers of
blue no matter who, but they don’t get the risks of fission.Sometimes ships really are unsinkable. You can build a small boat out of materials that are themselves buoyant. If you make a boat of a foam material or some woods, you can submerge that boat at the bottom of a lake, release it, and it will pop right back up to the surface. It’s hard to build an ocean liner this way, but there are truly unsinkable boats. There is a difference between safety by backups/safety mechanisms and intrinsic safety. Your car’s engine cannot explode in a nuclear fireball. It’s resistant to nuclear explosions not because of some elaborate series of safety mechanisms and backups, but simply because it lacks the capability to generate any kind of atomic reaction. Physics, not engineering, provides for the safety of unsinkable boats, your car’s lack of nuclear explosiveness, and fusion-fission reactors.
You speculate that the beam may not be shut off fast enough. But there IS no “fast enough” in this context. This is not some system that has the capability of spiraling out of control. Imagine you had a combustion engine that was provided air by a blower motor. The blower motor can supply a certain m^3/min, and this is all the air the engine receives. The motor can only supply the engine so much air; it is fundamentally incapable of spiraling out of control.
There’s no way for a fusion-fission reactor to explode in some runaway process. You design the neutron beam so that its absolute maximum power is still well below what would be required to turn the fission reactor into a pile of slag, like orders of magnitude below. You don’t put some big honking fusion reactor in this system. You build your fusion portion so that it’s only capable of providing enough neutrons for a gentle slow fission burn. There simply will never be enough neutrons in the system for the fission pile to experience runaway fission.
for the vibes based analysis.Just admit you don’t understand the technology enough to explain why you feel its unsafe, then get back to us when you figure out its fossil fuel companies.
Perhaps the PRC has a better understanding than you.
Okay, but. How many of those happened? I can think of two. And fukushima was 100% avoidable if it wasn’t for capitalism. They knew it could happen, they knew what to do to avoid it, they were warned multiple times, and did nothing, because why would they spend money to fix that. There are ways to ensure better safety and that this won’t happen, unless something really bad happens. Now, burning coal will always pollute the environment, aggravating global warming and causing death all over the world. Don’t underestimate CO2. Yes, we can research better solutions, we can also research better safety measures and use something that is ready and robust instead of continuing to use coal and oil. The only thing I’m trying to argue here is that nuclear is better and safer than coal/oil plants which cause the most early deaths per unit of energy produced
Unlike pure fusion projects such as ITER, Xinghuo will combine fusion and fission. The high-energy neutrons from fusion reactions will trigger fission in surrounding materials, increasing energy output while potentially reducing nuclear waste.
So will the fission part of the plant will be processing nuclear waste?
Also, interesting that the hybrid nuclear plant has the opposite approach as hybrid nuclear bombs, where fission energy is used to trigger a fusion reaction.
A fusion fusion-fission plant
10 years from now China’s going to (insert pictures of startrek) and the US is going to (insert pictures of Ravenholm).
5 years actually 😏
burying the lede a little there - fission plants have existed for like 80 years; fusion-fission is the important part
I hadn’t heard of it before, but it seems feasible, and has some attractive characteristics for someone like China with a longer perspective on its investments.
You know how a thermonuclear bomb uses neutrons from a fusion detonation to enance a fission detonation?
They talked about Q value alot, but why compare those to pure-fusion test projects? Strapping a nuclear reactor is obviously going to generate more energy than an experimental device not designed to break even. What I want to know is it predicted to be more or less efficient than a reactor by itself, what other advantages it might have, is it capable of recycling nuclear waste for example.
One advantage of these reactors is they’re completely meltdown proof. You design the fission component to be sub-critical - the fission core can only maintain a reaction as long as the neutron flux from the fusion reactor is maintained. The neutron flux doesn’t just enhance fission, it’s a necessary component for the fission to keep going at all. And the fusion portion doesn’t make net energy, it’s just a glorified way of turning electricity into neutrons.
If anything goes wrong, you just flip a switch and shut down the fusion part of the reactor. Temp starts increasing too much? A sensor flips a switch and the fusion reactor shuts off automatically.
