What If The USA Went All In For Nuclear Blast Fusion?

[Spacescifi]

Some know what I mean.

Put a nuke underwater. Blow it up. Let the water turn turbines. Create electricity.

Realistically it's more complex, as shaped charge detonation may be advantageous, and turbines must be at the right distance to get poweres but not annihilated

 

How long in decades would it pay for itself? Would we no longer be energy dependent on other nations?

[darthgently]

44 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

Some know what I mean.

Put a nuke underwater. Blow it up. Let the water turn turbines. Create electricity.

Realistically it's more complex, as shaped charge detonation may be advantageous, and turbines must be at the right distance to get poweres but not annihilated

 

How long in decades would it pay for itself? Would we no longer be energy dependent on other nations?

It would be far more efficient to simply run the same nuclear materials through a modern nuclear power plant design.  And there would be no tsunamis or massive fish kills either.

[magnemoe]

On 5/21/2023 at 9:09 PM, darthgently said:

It would be far more efficient to simply run the same nuclear materials through a modern nuclear power plant design.  And there would be no tsunamis or massive fish kills either.

Think the idea here was to generate steam, now you could make something like an unholy mix of an IC engine and an orion drive but heating the chamber an injecting steam to turn turbines would be more practical. 
And this only makes sense if you use huge bombs as in many megaton and use it as an low tech fusion plant but yes standard nuclear reactors would work better. 

Only practical use case I can think of might be to draw power from an orion engine on an warship to power weapons. 
 

[Nuke]

1. carve out a sphere underground.

2. line sphere with reinforced concrete.

3. under the sphere install a heat exchanger, with the other side being a steam loop. 

4. apply lead blankets to the surface (i imagine spraying on a layer of molten metal, building up a few coats, but i suppose you could just install panels).

5. suspend nuclear warhead from ceiling holding it in the center. 

6.detonate nuke.

7 pump pool of molten lead through heat exchanger, the out put could either go to a spray coat system or to a lead panel molding facility. 

8. redress sphere with lead.

repeat 5-8.

it might work better if you evacuate the sphere of atmosphere, but that might prove problematic being underground. but you wouldnt have to design a sphere that can handle directly applied nuclear shockwaves.

not sure how fast you can cycle. nukes are also kind of expensive. if you can generate a pool of metal that can stay molten for a few days, it would give you plenty of time to reset. then can you supply nukes fast enough? you would probibly need the plutonium from a lot of different fission plants to keep it pulsing. 

perhaps instead of pumping down the chamber, replace air with deuterium/tritium mix. then you just need a basic fission core to set it off. thermonuclar desing usually focuses the x-rays on a smaller volume, but if you could reflect the x-rays back into the sphere and let it bounce around long enough, it may impart fusion level energies, you could also pressurize the hell out of the thing being underground to get the density you need. but i dont know enough about nuclear weapons design to know if that would work or not. 

[sevenperforce]

15 hours ago, Nuke said:

perhaps instead of pumping down the chamber, replace air with deuterium/tritium mix. then you just need a basic fission core to set it off. thermonuclar desing usually focuses the x-rays on a smaller volume, but if you could reflect the x-rays back into the sphere and let it bounce around long enough, it may impart fusion level energies, you could also pressurize the hell out of the thing being underground to get the density you need. but i dont know enough about nuclear weapons design to know if that would work or not. 

Unfortunately it won't. You need a spark plug and a plasma source like Fogbank, and neither of those are going to be approximated by a giant-reflective-sphere arrangement.

On 5/21/2023 at 3:09 PM, darthgently said:

It would be far more efficient to simply run the same nuclear materials through a modern nuclear power plant design.  And there would be no tsunamis or massive fish kills either.

I don't particularly feel like running the numbers atm but I am guessing that you would need at least multi-megaton-class nukes before the accessible energy from thermonuclear fusion pulses would exceed the output of simply shoving the fission materials into a modern reactor.