Fusion power - just around the corner.

The Winky article:

Lithium is used in a fusion reactor to produce the Tritium. However, just like Deuterium being available in seawater, there is enough Lithium for the whole world for 6,000,000 years in the sea.

Saying such nonsense undermines the rest of your post.

There are numerous articles that state plutonium-239 can be made from a fusion reactor where neutrons are readily soaked up by uranium 238.

Much like uranium then, which could be economically extracted from sea water to power fission reactors. They don't need to yet, but they could.

yes. no shortage of nuclear fuel

for about 50,000 years anyway

Fission has plenty of uranium. In fact it has so much that the US were making bullets of of it.

Trouble is you need a fast breeder reactor, where yo trap escaped neutrons from the U235 in the core in a U238 blanket, which gives you plutonium. Which people are scared of.

Andy

But I imagine that stuff is depleted, i.e. had most of the U235 removed for 'other purposes', so it's a byproduct. The British Challenger tanks used depleted uranium shells during the Gulf War, and the high density of uranium (19.1 g/cc) meant the shells carried a heavy punch and greater ability to penetrate enemy armor.

;-)

Unfortunately they also un-assemble themselves (often spectacularly and to the cost of their surroundings) some years later. ;-(

Cheers, T i m

Whoooosh

I think we have a billion years or so.

indeed, but stick depleted uranium in a breeder reactor and you get lovely reactor grade plutonium via neutron absorption

After a bit.

"By capturing a neutron, uranium-238 becomes uranium-239 that rapidly changes by beta radiation into neptunium-239. This neptunium is transformed then by beta radiation, after 3 days on average, into a new nucleus: plutonium-239. This radionuclide is fissile, like uranium-235."

The reality is that right now uranium ore is so cheap that its cheaper to enrich it, shove it in a reactor and store the used fuel in ponds indefinitely than it is to reprocess for u235 or plutonium. Let alone build a fast breeder.

Ah, of course. I think I see that other-thread question "can I legally self-install a combi if it's out in my garden" in a new light now.

#Paul

;-)

It's quite sad to think that we (well, not us here or even humanity the way we are going now) will be vaporised when our heater 'space heater' explodes. [1] ;-(

Cheers, T i m

What planet do you think you're on?

T r o l l strikes again, I see.

2) This fate will happen in a few billyun years time.

The jury is out on that one. With a reduction of Sun's mass our orbit will become larger, plus a few other unknowns and unproven hypotheses.

Aww, thanks for continuing to follow everything I type.

Or it may, so my comment still stands clever bollox.

Quite, well done for repeating my point.

Yes and?

Any chance you could get another hobby, rather than just this constant public faceplanting? ;-)

Cheers, T i m

Thank you for the long explanation of "Trouble is you need a fast breeder reactor, where yo trap escaped neutrons from the U235 in the core in a U238 blanket, which gives you plutonium. Which people are scared of." which Chris snipped.

Andy

you don't strictly need a *fast* breeder, but that is the sort that generates more plutonium than it starts with U235

Correct. When fast reactors were initially conceived it was assumed that they would breed fast enough to support an expanding reactor programme. Once people went into the designs for commercial sized reactors more carefully it became apparent that they could just about create one "new core" over 30 to 40 years of operation, nothing like so attractive as original estimates.

I don't think there is any reason in principle why one could not design a thermal reactor that would breed at better rates, but it is a complicated optimisation. If you go for a pressurised system, and try and put more U238 in or immediately around the core, the pressure vessel size goes up and hence the capital cost. Other strategies require higher initial U235 enrichments, which increases the running cost. An attraction of sodium cooled fast reactors is that they are unpressurised, so it is easier to engineer a thick breeder layer just outside the core. But then you have the extreme difficulty of making reliable secondary heat exchangers (sodium to water) because of the corrosive nature of water. Still being pursued in Russia, India, and China. Abandoned by US, UK, France.

A non-trivial proportion of the power generated in modern uranium-fuelled reactors actually comes from plutonium bred within the fuel elements.

As someone else said, another early driver of fast reactors was the idea that uranium would run out sooner rather than later, just like the idea in the late 60's that oil would run out in the 1980s. Both these predictions were based on very careless reasoning.