phoenix_ca

Sure it does...if it's using thorium for fuel. U-233 is produced from Th-232 (U-233 production is actually a well-known part of the thorium fuel cycle). The reasons for CANDU reactors being relatively harmless when it comes to proliferation isn't because they don't produce nasty stuff like plutonium, it's that they're terrible at it (that Pu can be burned anyway, not that you'd want to try to get it out of the spent fuel, given reprocessing costs). There are far better reactor designs if your goal is to actually extract weapons-grade plutonium from it. Besides, there are other problems with using U-233 for weapons, namely that it contains some U-232, which is really nasty in terms of gamma ray emissions when compared to Pu-241. Like "you need a hell of a lot more shielding and you can forget about handling your nuclear weapons with any ease" sort of nasty. U-233 was studied for use in nuclear weapons and at least part of the reason it isn't is because it's so liable to kill the people working with it. It poses a relatively low proliferation risk compared to natural or enriched uranium fuel, which is good news for reactors based on using thorium for fuel. Relevant reading: https://www.princeton.edu/sgs/publications/sgs/pdf/9_1kang.pdf http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/10/31/27/PDF/C111.pdf

Actually not a terribly impractical idea given that the entire launch system is supposed to be reusable. Something goes wrong after launch, you just head back home and refuel, stick everyone on another Dragon V2 and launch again. Sure, you lose fuel, but you needn't actually plan for loooooong stays in space that way.

Yays! And stuff. Relevant:

China hopes to have one in ten years, but as one of the articles from the OP remarks, this is something of a pipe-dream. Estimates are usually around the 25-year mark for getting a practical thorium molten-salt reactor built.

Good points about the solar power in the desert, but my concern was more with battery explody-ness with high-heat. That too could be solved with nanobatteries though. To be fair, while most of our base load here comes from either hydro or nuclear (and yeah, we have some tentative plans for building ACR-1000 reactors to replace the older CANDU designs), Alberta still uses great heaping piles of coal power. Like, massive, massive piles of it. The vast majority of their power comes from coal, and this from the province that also extracts bitumen (not crude oil; you actually have to dissolve bitumen in gasoline before you can use a pipeline to move it) from the tar sands leaving a vast toxic mess.

CANDU reactors can already use it as a fuel. They can also use natural uranium as a fuel. And plutonium. And LEU. And...well this image shows it more clearly: It's amazing what using heavy water can do for a fission reactor (to say nothing of being able to refuel the reactor as it's running, so no need to turn it off until it reaches the end of its life cycle...in theory at least, this is definitely not the case in practice but the simplified refuelling process helps). So hey, Canada's totally ready to use thorium whenever the need arises. The only big issue with these things is the relatively high cost of the heavy water, but it still results in pretty darn cheap energy. And once you have one running, you can basically stick any somewhat fissile material in the thing and as long as you're smart about it it'll burn it. They also cannot be used to breed weapons-grade plutonium. Sooooo...I'd say we've got these issues covered over here. Question: Do you mean to specifically talk about molten-salt reactors? Because if so then yes, in terms of cost (if the darn things can be made to work on a large scale soon; honestly the prospects for DPF and polywell fusion look somewhat better at this point), they could certainly out-shine most uranium reactor designs.

When it comes to electric cars, bring on the nanobatteries. The whole range problem is likely to be solved soon enough. Whether anyone will actually be able to afford those fancy-shmancy nanobatteries is a different story altogether. Electric cars certainly do seem to be the way to go, especially since they already use infrastructure that's widely available. Where these won't work at all is in areas where electricity isn't so readily available, including remote locations far from civilization, and cities or countries with little-to-no electrical grid. There, IC will still reign supreme for decades to come, and for ultra-long-distance treks (like say, taking your jeep deep into the Sahara or Australia Outback, where taking an electric car is a bad, bad idea, and not just for the range issue), maybe hydrogen fuel will see some use. As for hydrogen, that compressed-hydrogen-isn't-feasible bugbear came up again, so it's broken record time: There are other ways of storing hydrogen: See also: Reading: http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/newsreleases/2009/june/feather-fibers-fluff-up-hydrogen-storage-capacity.html http://cleantechnica.com/2009/06/24/hydrogen-fuel-tanks-made-from-chicken-feathers-could-save-55-million/

Don't even try to export directly to Excel data. CSV is fine, easy to convert (I could write a CSV -> YAML converter in my sleep, not that anyone would need to do that, since such things already exist), and works with pretty much every program made to handle such data. Also, Microsoft lied and never actually opened-up xlsx so trying to export information to it takes reverse engineering and some alchemy, last I checked. CSV export could actually be very useful, for perhaps creating a catalogue available online with a Google spreadsheet (and I'm kicking myself now for not thinking of it ).

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/52080-Basic-Aircraft-Design-Explained-Simply-With-Pictures https://github.com/ferram4/Ferram-Aerospace-Research/wiki FAR doesn't make the overall game easier. It makes aerodynamics more realistic, which is actually a whole hell of a lot harder (fluid dynamics is easily more difficult than orbital mechanics, at least when talking about simple 2-body situations). The "more easy" part of it is that since aerodynamic drag is modelled so much better, you can get into orbit around Kerbin (and any other planet with atmosphere) with less ∆V than stock, and it actually makes serial staging and pointy rockets an advantageous thing.

I'm going to start sounding like a broken record soon. There are other ways of storing hydrogen: See also: Reading: http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/newsreleases/2009/june/feather-fibers-fluff-up-hydrogen-storage-capacity.html http://cleantechnica.com/2009/06/24/hydrogen-fuel-tanks-made-from-chicken-feathers-could-save-55-million/ I'm pretty sure there's no-one left in the industry that's actually considering sticking pressurized hydrogen into cars. It's so wildly impractical as to be absurd. I kinda have a chuckle whenever people here think that reactors are dangerous. Our CANDU designs have always been remarkably robust and safe (and generally easier to fuel because they can use...well pretty much any form of uranium), and are only getting more so. Wish we had the will to just build them all over the country and be done with it. Leave the dirty tar sands for the 'mericans.

I'm fully aware there are other engines available. People were suggesting that Squad write their own engine, not license a different one. That just isn't going to happen unless Squad loses their collective minds or they get a huge influx of cash. Making your own game engine takes years of development by a fairly large team of skilled programmers, minimum, and it's a pointless exercise most of the time now anyway because there are so many better options available. In short, your response is a classic case of missing-the-point. On top of all that, switching to a new engine would invariably mean Squad would need to re-learn non-trivial portions of their workflows, as well as rendering prior learned knowledge obsolete. It's not impossible; CryEngine's licensing costs are only $10 per user now, but if Unity decides to take the same route, I don't see how it'd be very practical.

Physics can be multithreaded just fine. PhysX 3 has done that for a looooong time now.

Assuming both work, use the polywells to retrofit coal and gas power plants, and use the DPF reactors for new reactors in areas without previous power generation infrastructure, as well as distribution of power generation. Kinda a win-win, they both have their niche, and way less expensive than ITER.

Fusion is, with adequate funding (in the millions of dollars, so comparatively little), not all that far off. No, it doesn't work yet, but the problems left are engineering problems, not ones with the physics or the science involved. The science has been pretty much done. http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/ But no, the whole point is that they wouldn't need fission reactors to keep running. I'm curious: where did you get that idea?

Sounds awfully like a barely contained H-bomb. I suppose it's possible, but I don't see how you could get a decent burn time out of it. Those chain reactions happen fast. No matter how strong your containment, that bang is going to be big and all in one go, more-or-less.

There are other ways of storing hydrogen: See also: Reading: http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/newsreleases/2009/june/feather-fibers-fluff-up-hydrogen-storage-capacity.html http://cleantechnica.com/2009/06/24/hydrogen-fuel-tanks-made-from-chicken-feathers-could-save-55-million/ Not if you have a lot of cheap electricity available. If fusion works, relatively small fusion reactors could provide enough electricity to use electrolysis of water on a commercial scale, producing hydrogen for fuel and oxygen, well, for breathing I suppose. (Iceland already does this to some degree, but mostly because they have access to relatively cheap geothermal energy.)

Yeah. Right. Squad will write a new engine for "KSP 2". And pigs fly and fairies are real and I'm actually a two-thousand-ton bagel with little hands to type with on a keyboard.

I wasn't suggesting NASA would do it, or even any government agency.

There's no such thing as a "small tokamak".

This game is way too easy. It won't be acceptably realistic until there are Kerbal politicians that randomly cut funding to your program because reasons and parts randomly fail without any sort of warning. Remember, any tools you use to help you in flying through space in KSP are cheating. Especially those damned manoeuvre nodes.

This: http://quantumg.net/advancements_in_dense_plasma_focus_for_space_propulsion.pdf And this: http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/ Could well mean practical fusion rockets in the relatively near future.

The generations to come. All that other stuff is small potatoes compared to what we could potentially achieve in a few decades. 72-day flight to Mars on a fusion-rocket, anyone?

When it comes to Tesla motors, the price needs to come way, way down (like $400/month, not $800-1000/month) before it becomes viable for enough people for it to matter. That or the price of gasoline needs to skyrocket (more), but if it did then the cost of living would be so damned high we'd have other problems.

2001: A Space Odyssey has nothing on Solaris when it comes to pointlessly long scenes. What the hell was with that car scene? Really? What was it, fifteen minutes of just...driving around in a car? (Edit: Okay it was five minutes. It sure felt longer.)

Are you controlling the vessel from the correct part?