In reply to [email protected]'s message of Tue, 27 Mar 2012 13:38:41 -0400 (EDT): Hi,
Nuclear reactors are already way past self sustaining. In fact they produce huge amounts of excess power that is sold and consumed as electrical power. However I suspect you are trying to lead this discussion into UFOs. ;) The radioactivity is not a consequence of inefficiency. It's a natural consequence of the fissioning of heavy nuclei with neutrons. This is because heavy nuclei are "neutron rich" relative to light nuclei, so when a heavy nucleus is fissioned, creating two or more light nuclei, there are always a few neutrons "left over". Some of these escape as free neutrons (and continue the chain reaction), others remain attached to the daughter nuclei (i.e. the fission fragments), which are then radioactive (because they basically have too many neutrons). Interesting side note: If you could initiate the fission reaction with protons iso with a neutron, then you could conceivably end up with stable fission fragments (i.e. not radioactive). >Right, that's somewhat how I thought they operated, and so my follow-up >question is what if the energy being produced simply wasn't distributed >'perse >to various facilities or buildings, facilities, households, or >what-have-you,,, but instead rather, for a more highly efficient purpose or >function? > >IOW's, instead of simply expending energy, why not use it in a more highly >efficient manner, so as to enable it to operate on a self-sustaining mode. > >Now, the purpose of having a self-sustaining Plant (no energy expended) >would first be to eliminate any radioactive-waste by-product. > >The other main idea or benefit to having a powerfully efficient >self-sustaining system would of course depend on the development of some new >revolutionary breakthrough engineering skills, that can enable an altogether >new >compatable form of propulsion (yet unknown to us) to be directly integrated >within the Plant, so to operate at peak performance, on-demand. > > ><< That is exactly what a nuclear power plant does... (well, not yet...) > Regards, > Adrian Ashfield >></HTML> Regards, Robin van Spaandonk http://rvanspaa.freehostia.com/project.html
