The Breakthrough in Fusion We've All Been Waiting For
Figure 1. Good Looking n-U Fusion Plant in Central California
An uppity choir member has castigated me for not mentioning Trialpha in the piece on fusion. But Trialpha's interesting concept is based on blasting Boron-11 with a proton, which then splits into three heliums. How can he call that fusion?
But just as I was about to throw him out of the choir loft and onto the congregation below, I realized I had it totally backwards. What we have in 90 odd power plants spread around the country are n-U fusion reactors. These devices fuse a neutron with a U-235 nucleus to create electricity with an engineering gain of about 18. That's at least ten times better than the claimed engineering gains of any of the other fusion concepts of which I am aware, none of which claims are close to being proven. This is the breakthrough in fusion we have all been waiting for.
I suggest that the operators of these fusion plants apply to the NRC for their Section 30 license quickly. Alternatively, if your plant is in an Agreement State, you can go to your state regulatory agency.
Actually, for all the NRC fuss about radiation exposure, why aren't they concerned about radon emissions from coal burning power plants and from the fly ash landfills? Oxidized Uranium salts are soluble, reduced Uranium salts are not, hence there is a reasonable level of Uranium in coal. Indeed, I seem to rember reading decades ago about the value of a lot of low grade coal deposits are Uranium reserves.
Excellent spoof. I was a little puzzled by the statement that this new fusion process is only ten times better than the old processes - magnetic and laser confinement. Lasers just recently reached "break even" :) The comparable number for the new n-U process would be energy out (203 MeV) over neutron energy in ( 1 to 2 MeV). That's a gain of over 100X. :)
A more brutal comparison might be power plant output over power to run the pumps, magnets, lasers, etc. 1000X for a nuclear plant, 0.001X for fusion. Even if we think like solar salesmen, and assume Moore's law will apply forever to fusion, with a slope of 10X per decade, we are looking at six decades before fusion can catch up to fission. Clearly we need a breakthrough in fusion. Maybe they will figure out how to separate quarks, and get yields closer to the theoretical maximum E = mc^2. :) :) :)