Corn based fuels a really bad idea?

By "dangerous heavy isotopes" are you referring to what's commonly called nuclear waste and is it not an issue with fusion too?

 

Things aren't consumed at the mid ocean ridge, they are expelled there.

 

It is probably somewhat of a peripheral issue, but not the predominate issue like in fission. Fission breaks down enriched uranium, fusion causes hydrogen isotopes (with usually an extra 1 or 2 neutrons) to fuse into alpha particles (basically helium nucleii). Same thing as in the sun's primary hydrogen cycle. So, while the radiation has to be contained with fusion, (and could possibly irradiate surrounding materials) the byproduct of the process is not a heavy poisonous metal with a long half life.

The amount of helium thus produced is relatively small because of the great heat energy released per molecule; thus it greatly minimizes the waste problem.

 

++ on that. People are still worried about the Scorpion and Thresher nuclear subs that sank, as well as the unknown number of Russian nuclear sub accidents. This stuff does not go away just by dropping it into the ocean.

 

Yes and No.

Yes, Iron-59 (or 59Iron) is a problem only for a few days after shutdown.
(Fusion plants are made of iron.)

No,,, the lighter isotopes produced from fusion all have shorter half lives.
(This is true for most elements on the "Chart of the Nuclides.")

Edwardo

 

We got those cores.
Spell,,,,, DSRV...?
(Oops, secret)

 

Mondial, you are now to report immediately to your control for debreifing.

 

How much shorter? Given the half life of waste now generated shorter could still mean a very long time.

 

Fusion: 59iron = 44.5 days But, most of the radiation is in "Beta" form,, stopped with a thin plastic face shield.

Fission: 139Pu = 24,100 years. generally "Alpha" radiation, , , stopped by a thin sheet of paper. But, don't breath the dust for 100% of cases develop cancer, , lung or bowl.

Thus, Fusion wins with a 0.00051 % shorter 1/2 life.

Edwardo
(BTW, I googled this.)

 

Danke

 

Personally I think fusion research and research on converting algae-based fuel will be the best solutions for the US. If they can get fusion to work, then we'll all be driving electric cars and if they get algae-based fuels to work then we'll have a use for the Potomac river

 

Very true. Massive amounts of oil under there.

But good luck getting any politicians to not listen to the enviro wacko lobbyists and began drilling and building a refinaries.

 

Just because you've got an oil well in your back yard doesn't mean that the rest of us want one too.

 

I can think of a few uses for the Potomac already ...
... involving quick-set concrete and the schmuck who set the traffic lights in Alexandria, VA.

(Seriously: I burn more fuel idling at all the traffic lights than I do driving. My gas mileage is half what it was in the Boston area. Some "green liberal" town this is.)

 

+100

Our savvy, previous politicians here in Houston built a light rail system that runs from downtown, where nobody lives, to the Medical Center. So, if you are sick at work, you're all set. OR, if you want to go from the hospital to a downtown bar, great. Otherwise, you are driving. As the Guniness guys say ... "Brilliant!"

 

Yes, I know the ridge expells, but along its length are fissures of molten magma. Couldnt the nuclear waste be poured into that "soup" and be reconsituted into something less hazardous? Could it be pumped underneath?

Another thought I had, what if the waste were dropped "pumped" into an empty and abandoned deep oil well and capped off? The stuff is pretty heavy so it should sink to the farthest reaches and be lost seemingly forever???

There just has to be better thinking on nuclear waste than burying it inside a mountain where it could be found or opened by anyone, not only by peope of today but for a million tomorrows by anyone. IMVHO it has to go somewhere where we cant get to it ourselves with our current or future technology. Someplace remote where its effects wont harm anyone. We dug it up from the earth, we should be able to figure out a way to put it back. It was molten once before supposedly.

 

No
No
No

There is no way to break down molecules except the fusion them that I know of. There might be some scheme where you could build a breeder type reactor then modulate it by using spent fuel.....I don't think you could make it work though, I'd have to pull out my nuclear engineering book to be sure, but I don't thing so.

You don't want to pour it anywhere in the ground that is could leach into he ground water and give millions of people cancer.

Dumping it in the mountain is the best option out there currently.....if they would just open the mountain. My though would be clear out a 100-500 mile radius around it and that's the spot. The few people who live there aren't real happy with the idea, but there aren't very many because it's a frikin dessert. I say make it happen.

 

Therein lies the problem with almost all public transit systems in the US: they only serve a single special interest.

There's a road in Alexandria that runs between the interstate and the rail tracks. It runs from the city bureaucracy center past several new condo complexes, and dumps out on Van Dorn street, about five miles away. In that entire length, there is virtually no way on or off of it -- other than its own private entrance to the interstate. Just who was this road built for?

(That interstate entrance didn't used to be so exclusive, but they blocked off access from Clermont street on the other side of the interstate (in another jusrisdiction) to build a "bike path". Of course, you face four flights of stairs from the street to get to that path. But it closed off access from Clermont St.)

Washington has a pretty good metro system ---- *if* you live near a metro station, and you're going to downtown DC. But it's entirely radial -- to get from "A" to "B" outside DC you usually have to go downtown and change trains to go back to the other point. There was also a lot of local VA town politics around getting the state to build new metro stations ... near where someone wants to build condos -- until the condo market crashed.

The bottom line is that the US spent the last 100 years building the suburban structure around the automobile. Even before that, there was the horse drawn wagon and individual horses. Virtually all US population areas were built around personal transportation.

Public transit works when everyone lives in the same housing projects and works in the same office district. Adding public tranport after the fact can only replicate a limited set of "A" to "B" trips. You'd have to rebuild the whole metro area around a public transit system -- to move people to places the transit system supports. The existing metro structures were built on the unlimited end point options of the automobile.

One option that's been examined is variations on "personal public transport" -- a two or four person monorail system. But again, there are no rails to support it. What you have are streets. Busses have the problem of frequent stops. Arlington even did studies on how to set their traffic lights to accomodate busses -- including the stops. But the stops aren't of consistent length, so all they accomplished was making all the traffic sit around at lights. There's even been the proposal for the city to provide, in essence, a self-drive taxi system to eliminate the parking issue. Just take whatever city owned car is handy, and leave it at the curb for the next guy. But none of the options to use the existing streets eliminate the need to fuel the vehicles. So it's only like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, as far as "solving" energy problems is concerned.

Compare 'Frisco's "cable cars" or Amsterdam's trolley system. I've seen Amsterdam's system "close up". (You hear a bicycle bell, and turn to see a wall pass an inch in front of your nose.) But that system mostly covers the olde town, and has issues mixing with pedestrian traffic (just how many impacts are there, each year?). And it's also a mostly radial system -- converging on a single point. I gather the cable cars are mostly for tourists, by now, in SanFran, too. But you still need the rails and the power distribution system (overhead wires, or "third rail" in the road), and incur the power line transmission losses.

The automobile still gets you where you want to go, without a lot of excess stops along the way .... other than that from traffic mismanagement.

(DCers like to say that the roads are "really busy" -- but it's only the part they're stuck in that's busy. The improperly set and overly long lights collect traffic into clumps. Between the clumps: nada. These roads have way too much congestion for the volume of traffic. That was a high school math problem, back in my day: to keep traffic moving, you shorten the lights. Here, they turn it red and wait for half the county to gather behind it.)

So I suspect what we're seeing in the urban areas is a case of trying to "promote" public transit by artificially trashing the traffic patterns. Just because of the assumption that "public transit good, personal mobility bad".

I presume this stems from the pseudo-socialist view that everyone should be interchangable cogs. That, "from now on, everyone should be in the top 10%" -- which can only be attempted by dragging everyone into the bottom 10%. (But then there's a new range within that scale, so the downward spiral continues.)

Thought for today: those who try to drag everyone else down to their own level have assumed that they are beneath everyone else.

 

Isn't it this out of sight attitude thats gotten us where we are?

 

I actually meant were the subduction zones where the earths crust slips under the opposing plate. Another spot of interest is the fifteen twenty zone.

 

Well, there has been a lot of work on "safe long term storage" and it is argued endlessly, but the Nevada site is about as good as anything, though obviously not perfect. Pumping into deep oil wells and mixing with heavy crude doesn't work so good - remember heavy crude "floats on water" and is fairly mobile in the long term. And pumping into an extrusive system will eventually just bubble it back to the surface. I guess if you wanted to consider this "earth process based disposal" (which is kind of interesting actually - good thought) one should perhaps consider a subduction zone (such as the west coast - near Seattle - that would go over great!). Although this eventually pops up as a volcanic expulsion a few million years later also. Most site considerations naturally avoid high seismicity areas (ridges and subduction zones) because of the earthquakes and disruption that occurs there. More quiet zones of stable massive rock or salt domes, etc., is considered preferable. The Nevada site again is quite good, it is just that you will rarely hear anything but negativity on any nuclear disposal site.

 

OK, I'll bite. What the heck is the fifteen twenty zone?

 

Probably. But in most cases there was never any realistic long term planning or thought for anything weve ever done, we just keep doing whatever we want and worry about the outcome later. Or leave the mess for someone else to clean up.

When I was 9 years old I caught a 30 pound Northern in the St. Louis River in Superior Wisconsin. First fish I ever caught in my life. Then a older man walked up and said I couldnt eat it, he said it was poisoned. Huh? My Parents moved us to Duluth Mn in 1967 when my Dad got a job at the Air Force base. My first appreciation with mankinds relentless abuse of resources, was catching that fish in that river. I just hadnt seen the signs along the bridge and shoreline. Signs everywhere warned against eating the fish, the entire river was contaminated with mercury from the paper mill 20 miles up the river in Clouquet where they dumped industrial waste right into the river. Simultaneously I became aware the Eagle was sinking into inevitable extiction along with other birds, from the use of DDT, I was seeing Lake Superior contaminated with asbestos from the mining industry dumping taconite tailings into the lake and not being able to drink our city water. For a young boy it was all pretty amazing and surreal, that along with the ideals of MAD and garbage we were dumping everywhere, that we could really destroy our planet, or at least make it uninhabitable. Having my Dad and his brother both working in various venues within the military, even allowed on a several occasions to be with my Dad up at the base and be near front line F4 fighters during a scramble with full AB, I was intimately aware of the dangerous world we had built around us. The movie Dr. Stranglove may seem a comedy to many, but the reality was we really did that stuff every single day, and the ramifications of any "accident" would have most assuredly resulted in something few of us could have truly imagined. It seemed in my young mind, and everyone else seemed to feel that way back then, that it was simply a matter of time before we reached the end and blinked out. Someone would either "push the button", or we would simply choke and starve to death.

But things changed. The Eagle is once again flying free, the St. Louis river is stocked with Walleye and Northern and they are supposedly fit to eat, the dumping of waste into rivers and lakes by industries has ceased, and Ronald Reagan got our B-52's parked for the first time in almost 50 years, and started us towards a peaceful friendship with the USSR. Now even that, along with that God forasken Berlin wall have disappeared from our existence. Instead of nuke loaded B-52's flying out of Elsworth AFB everyday, the aircraft are doing other, less earth terminating jobs. So there is hope. Maybe.

IMHO we had a bunch of drug crazed hippies that didnt know how to take a bath or brush thier teeth or defend thier country, that talked us all into shutting down nuclear power. Now these same retards have us burning coal like there is no tomorrow, even using it to make food into gasoline, while they work in 20 story office buildings and leave the lights and computers on all night long as they drive home in thier Prius. We need to man up and use the brains God gave us to rethink the big problems and solve them. Not out of site out of mind fixes for people of tomorrow to have to deal with, but real intelligent fixes that make sense for everyone, not only today, but ESPECIALLY for tomorrow. This cooking food into gasoline or building hybrid cars and windmills BS is just another drug crazed hippie idea IMHO, and we need to get some brighter saner people involved in solving the problems. That little boy who was pissed off because he couldnt eat that big 30 pound Northern out of the St. Louis river, is still pissed off. Ya know, when your 9 years old, a 30 pound Northern is a REALLY BIG fish.

So no, if intelligent people (not necessarily PHD's) of the the world could determine that putting the nuclear waste somewhere where no one for a million years could ever reach it, and where it could in all probability do no harm, I wouldnt have any problem putting it "out of site". Its far better than any other alternatives that I know of.

 

Its an area in the south Atlantic where the earths crust is open and unformed and open to the earths mantle.

 

Have we sort of lost our sense of direction with this thread?

I also have wandered in a circle, but my inner compass is telling me "corn - corn - corn"...