Probably a stupid car question...

[kandrathe]

Ok, last time I'm going to post on this cause you can't seem to understand that necessity of shielding. You have to have something there to shield a reactor like this, it doesn't matter how compact you make or how low power it's going to be, there has to be shielding. Shielding is bulky and it weighs a lot. While a reactor like the Hyperion could work for powering a neighborhood or the like, it's still bulky.

I know you think I'm being dense (like depleted Uranium) or are in some way contridicting you on this, however, it's not true. In all my posts, I've called for the shielding needed to contain the risk. I'm not convinced the current process of having a "hot" steel core containment vessel inside a vast concrete and steel containment dome (thick enough to prevent a fully loaded aircraft from penetrating) is getting toward the miniaturization I'm thinking about.

Yes, yes, yes, I'm also considering having appropriate shielding, so this is not an issue. I'm asking and wondering if we've advanced the field of materials sciences ( e.g. dense composites and compounds, absorption, or deflection), or it we still tend to think about shielding as calculating it as the number of cm of "dense" and "cheap" elemental materials needed.

Also, you keep mentioning technologies, like the Wave reactor that have been around for decades, yet haven't been used. There's a reason why converters (the Wave reactor) and breeders are not used, and it's political, ie Non-Proliferation Treaty. Because of politics, the only reactors that you will see for civilian use are burner style reactors we have now.

Which is again... from my original discussion. I'm confident we would do more, and would make more progress if it weren't a political hot potato. It seems that using innovations, and better engineering would result in better designs, and it has outside of the USA. We are "brainwashed" into equating nuclear power with imminent death.

Lastly, we can make reactors that will run for 30+ years without refueling, the problem, again has to deal with Non-Proliferation. Naval reactors are designed to run for 30 years without refueling as they use extremely enriched uranium for their fuel (95%+ enrichment, almost pure Uranium 235). The ship is decommissioned when the reactor's fuel finally starts being so poisoned by the fission fragments that it is difficult to produce power. The Enterprise's refueling was actually a rarity amount ships equipped with Naval reactors, the rest typically get turned into razor blades.

Yes, again, which is why I'm asking why we continue to do it the "old fashioned way", where you need to spend time, energy, risk, and money enriching the fuel, and then building a reaction that results in the need for decommissioning. We know that abundant natural uranium is fissionable (as plutonium 239/94 after two beta decays) with the appropriate neutron source . Why do we need to continue to rely on the 1940's era critical mass approach? Because, people (the government) are afraid of allowing general access to something like weapons grade plutonium that would be generated in a breeder reactor of this sort. Of course, any average Joe who cracked open his "sealed" home nuclear core would probably be dead in minutes or hours. Just as surely as if they filled their basement with gasoline and lit it up.

You seem to be saying, "This is the way it is. Accept it." And, I'm saying, "I don't think it has to remain like this forever." We use and live with very dangerous substances daily, like LNG, ammonia, gasoline, or hydrazine, which nobody gives a seconds extra thought about. Heck, over 5000 people die every year by accidental electrocution, not even broaching the insanity of allowing people to drive their own vehicles. I'm not suggesting we increase our risks, only that we use our brains to better engineer the use of the abundance we already have. For the properly informed and motivated fiends, the means of mass destruction are all around us.

Ultimately I fear for some people, they would feel it is better to bankrupt society and allow millions of people to freeze to death, rather than risk trusting people with a little science. The same political mentality that advocates eliminating the instruments used to cause deaths, rather than contain the people who cause (or who are predisposed to cause) deaths. The same mentality that forces all air travelers to submit to intrusive scanning and groping, rather than to devise a way to separate out the bad apples and prevent them alone from unhindered access to airplanes.