NuclearNut

Actually I think it looks really nice and functional compared to a plain white paintjob, which, in my opinion, looks really ugly. Than again, I find the nearby oil refinery to look nice, and tend to build hulking grey and yellow structures in minecraft, so it could just be me. Must... have... link... to... mod.

Hmmm. But you would also have the problem of those panels working for a few weeks and then suddenly not working for a few more weeks, also that stuff is quite flammable with oxygen, so you might have a minor combustion problem, not to mention gamma radiation produced from high speed impacts by cosmic wind. Though it would be just fine as an exterior frame for structures.

I have a small suggestion, could you make a Davey Crockett that can be set up on the battlefield and carried piecemeal by kerbals to the firing position?

Hmmm.... Kilotons you say.... Doable you say.... I might just construct a enriched uranium transport craft with that. I wonder, what enrichment is the uranium in your mod meant to be Roverdude? Actually calculating how many centuries my uranium transporter would provide enough fuel to supply the world with nuclear energy would be fun.

You have brought a divine wind against the enemies of whatever mutual co-prosperity sphere I create. The enemy fortifications shall be lit up with fire appearing on the ground like so many cherry blossoms.

Having had this game since... wow, 0.17.1 I have to say, the best way to not get bored is to do three things. 1. Optimize existing mission designs. 2. Go to the challenges portion of the forum. Even if you do not enter in any official capacity due to deacceleration sickness when landing, a sub optimal engine exhaust-fuel tank interface, spontaneous reactor core containment ejection phenomena, spontaneous kerbal liquefaction due to sub optimal ground interface, or any other such minor incident. 3. Make challanges yourself.

Whatever it is, it is weird. 25% is absolutely massive, I mean mindbogglingly massive, really really mindbogglingly massive, and thus should be studied more. If it is aliens, then we should avoid all attempts to contact or attempts to contact us by them, and get to work conducting an industrial production race with them. We have in that sanario less than a thousand years to surpass what they may of well done over tens of thousands. In the unlikely event it is aliens, I will be supporting a massive space based industrial drive. Heck, even if it is not I would support that.

Heck, even if it is a robot it needs circulation to cool it's processors. Either way it is going to have some sort of fluid in it, weather for cooling, heating, or transporting chemicals.

Well then they might just be able to get some decent funding for their programs then, eh? All they need to do is state that their SLS could be used for some sort of weapon to remove the monster of the week and boom, instant funding.

Hey, uh, where is the reactor going to go? Are you going to do a reactor room IVA? Considering it was one of the places they did not depressurize when reducing velocity, implying that it contains an IVA.

Actually it gets quite interesting with nuclear. On one hand, you are right, reactors take hours to increase in power output to capacity, on the other hand the O&M+fuel costs tend to be a few cents per KWh, likewise some reactors, such as france's PWRs and all BWRs can change power output for peaking (but still pretty slowly). However, all increases etc. are planned, unlike in wind and solar, making it easier to deal with.

Do you mean ignition, or do you mean ignition? From what I understand for the first, you would need a far more oxygenated atmosphere or far more burnable things to get such a large firestorm going, which at that point means you have to move around the mass of the atmosphere of the target planet with you. It would be much easier just to disperse some deadly poison or pandemic on the planet, or to simply introduce it to several salted nuclear weapons targeting their main cities, resulting in the death of millions due to radiation sickness. If you mean the second, I believe that thermal losses into space and the fusion of iron (among other things) in the crust would result in the reaction not being self sustaining and thus dying out quite rapidly, not adding much at all to the yield of any hypothetical nuclear weapon.

I wonder, would lemons get enough thrust? Imagine, a rocket powered by flammable lemons. I feel that what we need is someone with way too much time and free access to both LOX and lemons to test the flammable lemons rocket theory.

//Dark energy is not that, dark energy is... well dark, something that we do not understand, and something that must be researched.

Actually it gets even more complex than that. The facility has a capacity factor of 31%, whereas the reactor has a capacity factor of around 90%, that means that, charitably, you should need 2.9 megawatts installed capacity to equal one megawatt installed capacity for nuclear energy. So that works out to around 8.7 of said solar farms for one reactor. That would take up arround 34 703 Ha covered in mirrors. But wait, there's more. The lifetime of that reactor is, without extensions (most reactors receive extensions) 40 years. The solar plant will only last twenty. So that means you need, over the entire lifetime of the reactor, 8.7x2=17.4 solar farms for one reactor, or in other words, 38.28 billion dollars for your solar farm and required replacements to 7 billion for your nuclear reactor. Now mind, this is ignoring Operating and Maintenance (O&M) costs, which in this case go in the favor of nuclear power rather than solar.

Correct, though the high power density, cheap fuel, and less worry about nuclear weapons is something all nuclear power has in common. No one denied the research would be needed, you need research for wind and solar, expensive research at that. The fuel is also not "inherently harder to control" than solid fuel, they all have their problems, but a MSR would not be inherently harder. Oh, and that waste from the core lasts only 70 or so years before it can be re-cycled into new reactor cores. Oh, and the reprocessing equipment, if properly cleaned and drained of fuel material, will be completely non-radioactive and safe to handle. This is because it was not exposed to a high neutron flux for a long time, unlike the core. With this the containment can be like any other containment, heck, with this you do not need backup generators because the radioactive material can just be poured into a core spreading pool without any concerns, unlike in a conventional facility where the core material going into a core spreading pool is impossible because it is solid. So right there you have eliminated backup generators, most emergency coolant loops, and other such things. At this point the big redundant layer would need to be the containment vessel itself, nothing more. Oh, yeah, and tons: I present to you a whole thirty years of nuclear waste from one 1000 MWe nuclear power station (enough to provide the electrical energy for 600 000 people, assuming the average per capita energy consumption for the US), three of those containers (the ones on the very right if I am not mistaken) are the reactor core itself, which can be re-cycled in around sixty years. The rest are simply fuel rods bundled into a shielded container. These fuel rods have not been re-processed, thus they have quite a bit more volume than the actual waist portion of them. If they were re-processed only two of those containers would be there. In a MSR it would always be re-processed, and thus extremely low volume. The thirty percent figure I agree was a tad optimistic, it would most likely be less. That is simply because the highest capacity factor at the largest wind farm in the world was, guess what, 30%. A mere 30% is pathetic. But let's just say in our world that the wind never blows when the solar panels are at peak capacity, well then you get 50%, which is half of the time, a half that will be off peak hours and other such times, making it so that you must now use natural gas far more than 50% or 30% of the time. And yes, turbines are cheap, but they are limited (less than a hundred years of fuel left, for the US alone), and they require fracking, which hopefully you know about. If you do not, well let me explain it to you. Fracking is the process where you drill a regular oil well, and then pump down thousands of gallons of fracking fluid, hoping that that does not cause the natural gas to escape into anywhere else than your oil well. It is generally quite polluting and nasty, far nastier than uranium mining or nuclear power. Oh, and unlike nuclear power, it emits quite a bit of CO2, making it no solution to global warming. Actually the solution to costs in modern reactors is getting rid of the backup generators, secondary coolant pumps, and excess piping. They are also quite a bit safer and cheaper due to this. This is because they have either natural circulation for coolant, as in the ESBWR, or they have a large water tank on top of the reactor and convection cooling for the sides, as in the AP-1000. Both of those are far safer than a regular reactor, cheaper to build, and cheaper to operate. Nuclear is also innovating, we have several initiatives to develop new reactor concepts such as the MSR, Lead Cooled Fast Reactor, Supercritical Water Reactor, High Temperature Gas Reactor, and others. While wind and solar are getting cheaper, nuclear is doing likewise, and in doing so also getting safer than previous versions. EDIT:It should also be noted that, separate from this post, that the thorium fuel cycle has already been tested and conducted with breeding during the 1970s at the shippingport nuclear power station. It worked in a light water reactor, generating 2% more fuel than put in. This is something to note in this matter as there is more than one way to use the thorium fuel cycle.

This thing will never fly. There is no profit in going to mars, and no PR boost sufficient to justify it. Not to mention that, from a science perspective, humans are a net loss, it is cheaper, easier, and more efficient to send a rover to do the job.

If you are using a molten salt reactor, yes, you have to have onsite reprocessing and the fuel salt material is quite radioactive. In a lead or sodium cooled fast reactor that is not the case as the fuel rods are solid and reprocessing can be done offsite. In a MSR your concern would indeed be the primary coolant loop (PCL) breaching and mixing with the secondary coolant loop (SCL), that is the concern with all reactors that do not use water as a coolant. Now mind, in the place that this will happen, the steam boilers, the water already flashes into steam on a regular basis, in this case for the turbines. So a leak into the steam boiler would be a... leak into boiler. It would require the expected removal effort and cleaning operation, probably resulting in replacement of a few pipes. The above is true for lead, water, and molten salt coolants, now if you were to be talking about sodium, well sodium is sodium, and to deal with it an extra loop is added containing non-radioactive sodium. The same could probably be done in a MSR or LCFR to deal with any leakage from the PCL to the water loop. Actually that sounds really, really easy to contain. Molten salt at around 400 degrees celsius would be nice in two ways. First it would spread out loosing criticality very quickly, it would convect well, possibly (assuming the containment spreading pool is large enough) allowing for complete decay heat removal, cooling it down quite rapidly, allowing the building to be filled with water and the material scraped off. If you make a dedicated core spreading pool like in all proposed MSR designs you would just heat up the pool and drain it into specialized casks, no scraping required (unlike in a solid fuel rod reactor) The problem with containment vessels in conventional reactors is the threat of steam explosion and pressures exceeding the reactor vessel's max overpressure resulting in rupture and radioactive materials release. Know what a wonderful thing about nuclear reactors is? You can detect most all the radioactive materials in the sity the facility, and track them all, thus making it so that the airlocks can be scrubbed if anything ever gets there, preventing even small releases of harmful material. As many "little flakes of metal" would leave a nuclear power station using a MSR or any other reactor design, that is to say none on a regular basis. Why not just use natural gas only, your setup as your wind and solar will only work 30% of the time. It also seems a tad dirty to use natural gas, which has the wonderful world of hydraulic fracking and unchecked emissions into the world. Yes, natural gas is cheap, it is also a lot dirtier than nuclear. Oh, and reactors do have really, really cheap O&M (operating and maintenance), they just cost a quite a bit to set up, which is interestingly enough the opposite of natural gas. You would some source of HEU (high enriched uranium) or plutonium for the reactor, and using just plain gas centrifuge separation for uranium is incredibly expensive and would give you a small amount of material to work with (it is impossible to get plutonium in a good quantity without a reactor). Instead, you could generate a lot of electricity on the side using a MSR breeder reactor and get high enriched uranium through comparatively simple chemical reprocessing, or use a fast breeder reactor to produce plutonium and use chemical reprocessing. I do agree with you that fusion would be ideal for everything, primarily from a resource use standpoint (far easier to get deuterium than uranium), however I believe until then we need fission.

Actually the big problem is the onsite reprocessing which would be absolutely necessary. It is a problem because you would need to chemically process highly radioactive material at every reactor everywhere, unlike in a conventional uranium-plutonium breeder reactor. And, if you look at the whole thing in a bit different of a way, the problem is not that it requires chemical processing, but the fact that our experience with running small chemical reprocessing plants in nuclear power stations is basically nonexistent, whereas we already know how to run a liquid metal fast breeder reactor.

Well actually it has both more and less potential for weaponization. More because the uranium it produces does not have a nasty neutron emitting isotope to deal with like Pu-240, thus making weapons design very easy. Oh, and it is uranium, so really easy would be a better term. Now it has less because it is also, due to decay of one of the other isotopes of uranium it produces, quite radioactive, thus requiring it to be handled in a hot cell, impeding some steps of production. Personally I prefer the uranium-plutonium cycle because it has already been done and is just as good as the thorium-uranium cycle. We also have all this uranium just sitting around waiting for us to use, and if we used a fast reactor that uranium could quickly be turned into fuel rods. Oh, and uranium can be extracted from seawater, unlike thorium. - - - Updated - - - Where are you going to store your non peak hour solar energy? What, put it in megaexpensive batteries? Also, solar power is still more expensive than coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear. It also gets far, far more subsidies per kilowatt hour than any of the above and still maintains itself as more costly. You can get a nuclear reactor online in five years, less if you cut the red tape, and it will run 90% of the time, I choose that 90% of that time, as opposed to the >30% capacity factor for solar. (solar also takes quite some time to put online for similar reasons) The thing that slows down reactor construction is not that it is hard, but that people are whiney and stop it at every point.

So... does that mean that variable yield nuclear bombs would be possible? Also, how are you going to handle the MIRVs?

Where did you get that model of an orion?

Honestly I would rather be sitting right next to a modern nuclear bomb that is unarmed than a Tripropellant Lithium - fluoride - hydrogen fuel tank, or hydrazine for that matter. One I can hit with a hammer and be fine with, the others would not end well for me or the block I live in.

I just send a low yield nuclear bomb over there to push it out of the way.

Plus, if you saw the detonation directly and without welding glasses or blinking, and can see the mushroom cloud forming you probably have quite some time (a few hours) in which to do that.