151
votes
Accepted
What would cause a nuclear power plant to break down after 2000 years, but not sooner?
Software licencing.
Software for your automated maintenance and refuelling robots was under a 999-years licence (similar to common law permanent lease) . After it ran out, the licence was ...
- 1,064
65
votes
Accepted
Uranium block house heating
Maybe, but you really do not want to
The complete decay chain of U238 releases about 52 MeV, while U235 releases about 211 MeV. But while the energy per decay is 4 times lower and the decay rate is 6 ...
- 44k
61
votes
What would cause a nuclear power plant to break down after 2000 years, but not sooner?
Remember Y2K?
Software is hard, programmers are human.
If you want your readers to know exactly what went wrong, you can babble at length about data types or speculative branching or null references ...
- 1,756
59
votes
Accepted
Why would Fission be used in a world where Fusion reactors exist?
There are a couple of reasons:
Fission scales down better. Some SNAP reactors are tiny, smaller than a trash can. Radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTG's) can be made even smaller. Fission ...
- 82.7k
39
votes
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How can I build a Nuclear Reactor in my backyard?
In this case, it'd probably be common practice to use a Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR pronounced "lifter"). It's a kind of Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) that enriches Thorium (~3x more abundant ...
- 506
35
votes
How can I build a Nuclear Reactor in my backyard?
You don't
Not without handwaving.
Teenage and 8 kW
This is a first issue. I don't know any country that would allow teenagers to operate power plants on their own. High school teenagers usually can'...
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34
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Would a civilization on a planet with no natural Uranium-235 NEED to first achieve fusion before it can build nukes?
There are lot of neutron sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_source
Not all of them is useful for large scale transmutation since their neutron flux is many orders of magnitude smaller ...
- 6,419
33
votes
Accepted
How might nuclear power have never been developed?
Just make a world where uranium and friends are really rare.
Nuclear power reactors, and nuclear weapons, need rather somewhat rare and heavy elements, in order for them to be produced, and in other ...
- 1,294
32
votes
What would cause a nuclear power plant to break down after 2000 years, but not sooner?
You don't need any special materials to make a reactor last a long time. The Gabon natural reactor consists of uranium deposits in sandstone. Approximately 2 billion years ago they went critical. This ...
- 9,601
32
votes
Could a steam-age civilization trial-and-error their way to a nuclear reactor if they had access to enough fissile material?
If the time is 2 billion years ago, yes
If we assume an Earth-like world, where life evolved about three times as fast, then they need no technical understanding at all.
...because then natural ...
- 44k
32
votes
Accepted
Could a steam-age civilization trial-and-error their way to a nuclear reactor if they had access to enough fissile material?
I think it matters how the fissile material is "lying around". In our world, the two limiting factors are the mining and extraction of uranium, and the enrichment of the fissile isotope. Of ...
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28
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Practicality of a thorium-powered, superheated-steam car?
I have some interest in nuclear powered… well, spaceships mainly, but some of the problems apply to cars too.
Radiation is your enemy. It's not just "Oh we need some shielding, slap some lead around ...
- 2,146
24
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Could I build a nuclear reactor based on Bernoulli's principle?
Of course you could, but it's a VERY bad idea...
With enough time and money, such an engineering feat as that you have just described is surmountable. You could certainly design and build a nuclear ...
- 54.2k
23
votes
Accepted
Usability of fusion scoops in deep space?
Bussard ramjets have a bunch of major and probably insurmountable problems.
The principle issue is "scoop drag", caused by interaction of the ramscoop's magnetic field with the interstellar medium (...
- 78.5k
20
votes
What would it take to make thorium a prominent energy source?
The two primary drivers of Uranium fission reactors are the need for fissile material for nuclear weapons, and the ability to make compact reactors for powering nuclear submarines. Point two also ...
- 97.9k
20
votes
Nuclear Piston Engine - Is it possible?
Frame flip: Instead of fission with Uranium, consider fusion.
General Fusion is a company working on a novel fusion reactor design.
They begin with a blob of molten lead. At the top and bottom are ...
- 2,555
19
votes
Accepted
Extremely compact nuclear reactor?
Currently there are Small Module Reactors which use fission to generate an electricity output of less than 300 MWe. One of these, the NuScale produces 50,000 kilowatts/hour and is 76' by 15'.
https:/...
- 656
19
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How might nuclear power have never been developed?
Wait a bit longer for for the appropriate sentient species to appear on the scene.
U-235 half life is about 700 million years, so if you wait for an additional 2 billion years before a technological ...
- 22.5k
18
votes
Practicality of a thorium-powered, superheated-steam car?
See this debunking of the one in the news. Thorium is very slow to change the output on: you can’t just throttle it, but it would be putting out full power full time. For this reason alone, making ...
- 69.8k
18
votes
How can I build a Nuclear Reactor in my backyard?
For many technical reasons using nuclear power for individual houses is not a great idea. With nuclear power you either get too few energy to power a house (RTG's), or way too many and it's incredibly ...
- 8,842
18
votes
Nuclear power for nomads
They could use radioisotope thermal generators like those that were used as energy generators for satellites in the past. The one that was used on the cassini spacecraft (picture in the link above) ...
- 1,847
18
votes
Accepted
Nuclear Piston Engine - Is it possible?
Possible? Sure. Efficient? I can't imagine so.
When you're introducing things like washes, you're adding a lot of thermodynamic overhead in addition to mechanical wear/stress. You'd also need a way to ...
- 3,346
17
votes
How can nuclear power produce -electricity- in space when energy must be converted differently?
You're starting from a false assumption. Steam turbines don't use the buoyancy of steam to generate power, they use its pressure. This works just fine in space -- separating the steam from the water ...
- 17.9k
17
votes
How might nuclear power have never been developed?
PhD in energy policy - my dissertation focused on (among other things) the history of how power grids evolved.
Nuclear power is not unique or noteworthy as electrical generation schemes go. It's a ...
- 3,346
16
votes
How to design a zero-g nuclear reactor?
There have indeed been fission reactors used in orbit: both the Soviet Union and NASA launched experimental fission reactors on satellites - a Soviet one even malfunctioned and ended up deorbiting ...
- 4,656
16
votes
What would cause a nuclear power plant to break down after 2000 years, but not sooner?
This may not be what you were originally thinking, but perhaps some sort of natural disaster strikes which disables the plant. Even if the structure of the plant is made of an indestructible material, ...
- 663
16
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What sort of nuclear-based transportation would be best suited to cheaply transporting large amount of cargo if radiation weren't a concern?
First, I'll address why I think some options will not work.
Rockets
Because your world is an infinite flat plane, rockets are impractical (even if there is a 'space') - without a body to orbit around, ...
15
votes
Accepted
What would happen if you went swimming in a spent fuel pool?
xkcd covered this a while back, actually. It turns out that water is an excellent radiation shield (which is one reason the spent fuel is put in them in the first place). This means that if you swim ...
- 102k
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