Reply To: Energy Output – MW & GW

[zapkitty]

Tulse wrote: As I understand it, aneutronic fusion wouldn’t be much use for cleaning up fission waste, since what you want to do with such waste is transmute the problematic nuclei, which entails a neutron source.

Nope… neutrons can be generated without a neutronic fusion power source. In fact anyone can generate neutrons. All you need is electricity.

For the task at hand, transmuting the waste from nuclear fission… artificially “aging” it into safer forms… you’d just need a lot of cheap, safe power.

… and it’s FF to the rescue again! 🙂

Aneutronic fusion would actually be both safer and cheaper than neutronic fusion in this task and FF would enable flexibility and portability on top of that.

Instead of the concatenated expenses and increased hazards of trying to transport and integrate the nuclear fission waste into the fusion fuel process, FF units would power onsite particle accelerators wherever the waste happens to be located.

So you’d swap the costly neutronic setup of tritium and neutrons and steam and turbines and the extensive modifications to the fusion fuel cycle… for a particle accelerator and on-site waste processing wherever the fission waste happens to be.

The task must be done with whatever tools we have available. The problem is yet another Sword of Damocles hanging over our heads…

(passing extraterrestrial: “Errr… quite a blade collection you people have up there on the ceiling…”)

… but using FF units for the task would be a win-win-win situation.