Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Synapsid wrote:This is new to me. Thanks, Tanada.
Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world's first Proton Power. Better than it was before. Better...stronger...faster.
SeaGypsy wrote:You have quite an ability to explain this stuff Tanada- Bravo! (I couldn't resist running an originality check- it's all yours I know... )
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Surf wrote:Very old idea. However what is not mentioned is that it takes a lot of energy to get a proton up to the needed enegy level where it will smash atoms. It will not produce more energy than it consumes.
Hoever if you build a conventional fission reacto around the lead target. the nuetrons from the lead will start a chain reaction in uranium. In this design you will get more energy out then is consumed by the particle acelerator. The advantage of this design is that the fission reaction can be shut down by simply cutting power to the particle acelerator. The down side is that adding a particle acelerator to a nuclear reactor will add a significant cost. also it doesn't elliminate the need for emergency colling systems becasue the heat from decay of fisssion products can still melt the fuel.
Seems how nobody has shown the math or linked to a study showing that a proton induced fission of Lead is an energy loser what evidence do yo hav that it is?
Each reactor needs its own facility (particle accelerator) to generate the high energy proton beam, which is very costly. Apart from linear particle accelerators, which are very expensive, no proton accelerator of sufficient power and energy (> ~12 MW at 1 GeV) has ever been built. Currently, the Spallation Neutron Source utilizes a 1.44 MW proton beam to produce its neutrons, with upgrades envisioned to 5 MW.[5] Its 1.1 billion USD cost included research equipment not needed for a commercial reactor.
Surf wrote:Seems how nobody has shown the math or linked to a study showing that a proton induced fission of Lead is an energy loser what evidence do yo hav that it is?Each reactor needs its own facility (particle accelerator) to generate the high energy proton beam, which is very costly. Apart from linear particle accelerators, which are very expensive, no proton accelerator of sufficient power and energy (> ~12 MW at 1 GeV) has ever been built. Currently, the Spallation Neutron Source utilizes a 1.44 MW proton beam to produce its neutrons, with upgrades envisioned to 5 MW.[5] Its 1.1 billion USD cost included research equipment not needed for a commercial reactor.
Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_amplifier
That is for a nuclear reactor connected to particle accelerator. It's a lot cheaper to build a conventional reactor with passive cooling systems. Note many of the MEV numbers listed in the article refer to the energy of just one proton. For a functional system you would a lot more than one proton accelerated to those energy levels for a functional system.
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
The Energy Amplifier scam is exactly NOT what I am talking about, go back and read the post at the start of the thread. I am talking about using a Proton Accelerator to fission Lead, not Uranium or any other Actinides, and I am talking about doing so at moderate energies, not GeV range power, 55 MeV range of power in the beam.
Surf wrote:The Energy Amplifier scam is exactly NOT what I am talking about, go back and read the post at the start of the thread. I am talking about using a Proton Accelerator to fission Lead, not Uranium or any other Actinides, and I am talking about doing so at moderate energies, not GeV range power, 55 MeV range of power in the beam.
MEV is not the only thing you have to worry about. You have to also consider beam current. Most particle accelerators today produce beam currents in the micro amp range.
For the energy amplifier they are proposing a 1GEV accelerator with beam current of 1 to 10milliAmps. And they are expecting it to consume about 10% of the power output of the reactor. The core of the energy amplifier is within sized to be about 90% 95% of what is needed to be critical. The particle accelerator only supplies 5% to 10% of what is needed to make make the core critical. The fissioning uranium atoms provide the rest.
For the proton lead reactor the particle accelerator provides 100% of the energy need to fission the lead. meaning you will need a big accelerator.
A 1 GW nuclear power plant has about 31X10E18 fissions per second. If you assume 1 proton will fission 1 lead atom , you will need a beam current of about 1Amp. That is at about a 1000 times more current than the energy amplifier would need. such a particle accelerator could consume much of the power output of the proton lead reactor.
Fissioning that much lead will create a neutron radiation field just as strong as one from a regular reactor. Weapons grade Plutonium is made by exposing uranium to neutrons. So switching from uranium to lead doesn't solve the weapons proliferation concerns. All the metal of the reactor will also become radioactive including the lead that is not fissioned. Also you still have to deal with the radioactive fission waste.
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Is the formula you are using V*A=W? I don't think that applies to eV but if you have a source please show me your source.
Surf wrote:Is the formula you are using V*A=W? I don't think that applies to eV but if you have a source please show me your source.
Tanada what I did was use google to find out the number of fisssions for a typical 1GW power ploant. That told me how may protons were needed. Since electrons and protons have the same charge but opposite polarity, I again used google to find the number of electrons in amp of current. Turns out that number is quite close to the number of fissions. So I didn't convert eV to volts. However you got me thinking today.
You can convert MEV into watts. So I converted 55 MeV into watts and multiplied that by the number of protons. I came up with about 250MW. That is the beam power needed at the lead. That means that if you have a very efficient accelerator you could make this work. The particle accelerator would however consume about 50% of the power (a little less or more depending on the actual efficiency of the accelerator). However once you get to about 30% efficiency on the accelerator it is very doubtful that such a plant make money from the sale of power.
What is not known right now is how much it would cost to build an accelerator unlike any in existence now. Also we don't how reliable it would or how much maintenance it would need. The answer to those questions would tell you if this would be practical. In all likelihood advanced generation IV reactors with passive cooling and safety systems would always cost less to construct, operate, and maintain.
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
pstarr wrote:Nuclear radiation is over-rated. Check out the wolves of Chernobyl.Beery1 wrote:One more example (among many) of people so desperate to retain a hold on an unsustainable lifestyle that they're willing to irradiate the planet to get a few more decades of cheap energy to waste it heating and cooling homes.
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
dissident wrote:The energy gain is there but the problem is getting enough accelerated proton flux to make this viable. Particle accelerators deal with tiny amounts of accelerated material. You don't just pump a kilogram of protons in an accelerator. You couldn't keep this much confined in the accelerator magnetic field as Coulomb repulsion would be enormous (this brings to mind all those stupid sci-fi beam weapons that manage to remain collimated). So what we are talking about here is some sort of new accelerator design that is somewhat like magnetic confinement in fusion reactors. Instead of a torus it would be a linear confinement chamber, with ionized hydrogen injected at one end in sufficient amounts and accelerated to 50 MeV at the exit.
As with fusion, you have all the nasty nonlinear MHD plasma issues and would want to prevent abrasion of your accelerator wall although it would not be lethal to the operation of the reactor as it is with fusion.
Then we have to figure out what happens to the lead exposed to this beam. The conversion would happen at the surface and the products would be vapourized. You don't want this vapour to flow into the accelerator, which it can since the proton flux does not form a perfect wall. You also want to capture the energy released so the heat exchanger would have to be trapping these products. The design of this part of the beam reactor is very problematic.
I wonder if there is some study somewhere (likely archived by DOE from decades ago) which evaluated all these issues. I doubt nobody has studied this concept seriously. Perhaps the lack of prototypes is not just an institutional bias towards dual use technology.
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
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