Is hyperfission an easier goal than fusion?

[Guest]

Arguably a better use for all those nukes would be dropping them on the Martian poles >:3 

We could either send a probe to another star or get a chance at a second world for humanity/life to live on (right next door!) :3

If nothing else it would redistribute massive amounts of CO2 and water to lower latitudes and close to the surface, lots of potential there ;3

(and let’s face it... a ship using nukes for thrust is going to cost multiple trillions of dollars to ‘fuel’ >_<...)

Edited July 31, 2019 by Guest

[kerbiloid]

2 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

Orion is a rocket

The Orion authors highlight that Orion is not a rocket. They even a little show off with this, as they are not rocketeers, they are bombardiers, another nerd team.
It's a cannonball throwing back expendable cannons.
It moves forward because it gets kick from back, not because of throwing back something.

(Like J. Verne's Nautilus looks like steampunk by style, but is totally electric.)

1 hour ago, Dale Christopher said:

Arguably a better use for all those nukes would be dropping them on the Martian poles >:3 

Even Venerea..ian Venusian poles start looking useful for me.
Probably I was wrong when suggested to drop nukes on Venus to gather dust from clouds.
Looks like even on Venus surface we can build bases and even settlements if have a wish. (Thanks, square-cube law and adiabatic processes).
Martian ones are not to be nuked even more.

[sgt_flyer]

Well - to one in on the hyperfission / fusion thing : i think one of the most effective fission reactor concepts would be dusty plasma reactors. (A fission fragment reactor derivative) - one of the key things it enables is direct conversion to electricity (way more efficient than carnot cycle, or even brayton cycle)

Plus, dusty plasma reactors can also be used as vacuum based rocket engines (very high theoritical ISP)

Now, regarding the fusion reactor research, there's two research projects in europe that i think are quite complementary - Iter and Wendelstein 7X

Iter to help learn notably about how to manage a reactor on the long term (notably manage hyperenergetic neutron damage over a reactor's service life)

wendelstein 7X, as a stellarator design, is trying to get much more stable magnetic fields for plasma confinment. (So you'd likely need less power to contain the plasma vs a classic tokamak)

So both these projects would likely play a big part in future production fusion reactors. 

Now we need to break even the net power production on the whole logistics chain for deuterium-tritium fusion - not only powering the magnetic fields, but also powering the coolant pumps and the generation of new tritium. 

Next step in fusion would likely be to tame aneutronic fusion (like P-B11) which can support direct conversion to electricity

 

 

 

 

Edited August 1, 2019 by sgt_flyer