The Nuclear Lightbulb (2020)(beyondnerva.com) |
The Nuclear Lightbulb (2020)(beyondnerva.com) |
I can't find any evidence that the Easy Bake oven used a "special" light bulb. It just used 2 normal 100 watt incandescent bulbs as far as I can tell. Tungsten is a normal resistive heating element, pretty common in electric furnaces.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1e/Premier_...
Though there was a 2006 redesign that apparently didn't go well: https://www.cpsc.gov/Recalls/2007/new-easy-bake-oven-recall-...
You can buy a Panasonic FlashXpress toaster oven and get the Easy-Bake experience. Great toaster! Fast and very predictable. It starts cooking immediately and every toast cycle is the same duration. In a regular toaster oven it takes a while for the heating element to get hot before it starts to actually toast the bread. If you immediately cook a second batch of toast for the same amount of time it burns.
Like:
The idea would be to not just dump hydrogen into the reactor to heat it, but gradually warm that hydrogen, extracting as much power as one could along the way. At the end, this power would be used to superheat the hydrogen after it went through the reactor (by some sort of electrical heating), to a temperature greater than the reactor's temperature limit. Alternately, the exhaust stream could be further accelerated by some sort of MHD afterburner.
The observation here is that a nuclear rocket is not energy limited, but rather is entropy limited: the exhaust can only carry away so much entropy. So, the goal is to make the engine as internally efficient as possible, with as little thermodynamic irreversibility as possible.
Here's one of the reports, from 1969: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/85241637.pdf
Some highlights from this report:
- The fully gaseous core would operate at a pressure of 200 atmospheres. This is somewhat higher than the pressure in a pressurized water reactor core.
- The vapor/plasma fuel temperature would be 42000 Rankine. That's about 23300 Kelvin, roughly 4 times as hot as the surface of the Sun.
- The fiberglass pressure vessel was projected to last about 6000 seconds (100 minutes) of full power operation before its strength was compromised by neutron irradiation.
- The preferred fuel was uranium 233, which does not exist to any considerable degree in nature. It has to be bred from thorium. Since U-233 never had significant use in civil or military nuclear applications, the US has not produced any U-233 since the 1980s [1]. Highly enriched uranium 235 or plutonium 239 would also work, just not as well. All fueling options needed "bomb grade" fuel purity. That was the only way to make the reaction zone so compact.
Other details that I recall from other reports -- sadly not ready to hand:
- Later iterations of the design kept thinning the quartz envelope to maintain adequate transparency to UV radiation after accounting for color centers induced by radiation damage. This required aggressive/optimistic estimates of how perfectly pressure could be equalized on both sides of the envelope, particularly during start-up.
- The optimal core fuel temperature would have been even higher except that it was difficult to find materials that would be adequately transparent to even shorter ultraviolet radiation.
- Fission products were supposed to be separated from the fuel centrifugally before the fuel recirculated into the reaction zone. This seems chemically optimistic to me.
- There was little consideration of chemical factors in any of the reports I read. Given that the environment was extremely hot, rich in fluorine, and would soon contain most elements of the periodic table from fission products, this seems like an oversight. One that would probably be testable only by actually building and operating test reactors.
[1] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-an...
Another is not to fight it, and let them go. The closest thing to a torch drive possible with modern day engineering after the NSWR is the open cycle gas core rocket.
Thrust in meganewtons, and 1000+ ISP
[1] https://archive.org/details/0221_Big_Train_The_00_25_39_00
Either add a second pump or just power it from a legit non-mobile federally rated reactor plant.
Then we'd be something other than human. You'd need a species that values all members equally and has no preference for those in the same social group (or family, etc.). Likely it also means members cannot value themselves above other members. Without all that "civilized" simply means that some group gets oppressed and isn't allowed to fight back in any way.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Factor in the wastly different levels of difficulty between solar and nuclear power, I'd think we would also have the latter, if just as a simple alternative when you don't have the time or the capital to setup a nuclear power plant. Wind energy might be a different matter, as it comes with a lot more practical difficulties.
One could simply compare France and Germany to understand how things would end up, I think.
[1] https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4729955
[2] Actual Machines / Fucking Magic, from the Turkey City Lexicon: https://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/18/turkey-city-lexicon-a-primer...
Do you understand how much radiation it is in space? All human nuclear experiments in 20th century together wouldn't be even a rounding error there.
> They were ultimately able to recover twelve large pieces of the satellite, ten of which were radioactive.[1] These pieces displayed radioactivity of up to 1.1 sieverts per hour, yet they only comprised an estimated 1% of the fuel. One fragment had a radiation level of 500 R/h, which "is sufficient to kill a person ... remaining in contact with the piece for a few hours."
A more pragmatic argument is that, after the fission of literal tonnes of plutonium in the atmosphere in the previous century, the small risk of losing a few kg more here or there pales in comparison. Even all those RORSATs barely register in comparison to that.
I’m thinking of something like an interstellar flyby probe for the Centauri system. It wouldn’t be able to stop or do much course correction but you could send basically an autonomous space telescope that transmitted back observations. It would be able to see planets in the system much better than we can from here.
Do you realize how big space is?
