so, i just found an article about one Andrea Rossi with his E-Cat ELNR/Cold-Fusion Device for Home-Owners . .
And after some more Research found this, which is the only link on google without ecat or something like that in the link . .
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-02/27/rossi-roundup

What does one make of this now?

Good old cold fusion, rearing its mythical head again. The bigfoot of science, seen only through grainy images and looking for all the world to be fake.

It could be quite the game-changer in this world if it ever is figured out and replicated more than once. Not sure how a lot of energy companies would feel about it though.

To be honest, i don't place much trust into Rossi and his E-Cat, but the rest of that did not sound quite as fishy . .

Hmm, depends on how quickly it is adopted and how expensive it is to make (price per KWH). The reason coal, oil, and natural gas are still used in power plants is that it is still cheaper than wind or solar. Nuclear is cheaper in the long run, but given its radioactive dangers it is usually dismissed as an alternative.

I'll just put this here from Wikipedia.



10% non-radioactive copper in the spent fuel? CURIOUS.

Is he speaking english?
He is speaking english right?

Who?

Yeah, despite marathoning Breaking Bad, this chemistry is over my head

That Wikipedia Guy.

I think he's speaking Science.

Or Science!

Well he said that more than a year ago...anyone disprove it yet?

I suspect the guy hasn't let anyone get a close enough look at it to say for sure.

There's apparently going to be a test next February though.

Blah Blah Blah...Science...Blah Blah Blah..can we go shoot something now?

You do realize that it is because of Science that you have a tool with which to shoot something, don't you?

That's generally a bad sign in Science.

Yes.

Yes it is.

Considering Fukushima Daiichi was a 40yr old reactor with a 50yr old design got hit with a mag 9 earthquake and tsunami and then a mag 7 aftershock centered 40 miles away and there are NO cases of residents suffering from radiation related ailments it is more perception than actual danger. Also if people are still scared you could go for LTFR instead.

What does LTFR stand for? All I can find is that it is some kind of molten salt reactor (which runs hotter).

He has even gone as far as claiming that his reactors would be equipped with a self-destruct to prevent analysis. Oh, and it's not the frist miracle product of this Rossi guy, Google should yield plenty of history. My favorite is the company which could allegedly make toxic waste disappear or even better turn it into raw oil -- turns out they made the waste "disappear" in the deep of night at some unguarded landfills




Well, sounds pretty clear to me, without a major in physics:
- The nucleus of an atom is positively charged, and nuclear fusion means bringing two cores together. What happens between two equal charges? Exactly, the coulomb force pushes them apart, unless you put in enough energy to overcome that force. The threshold to overcome the Coulomb force is the aforementioned "Coulomb barrier", and it's not exactly minuscule.
- What happens during a nuclear reaction is fairly deterministic: The reaction involves X neutrons, Y protons and Z electrons, so the resulting atom should have exactly those numbers. If instead something completely different comes out (in this case iron), there's something fishy.
-- The fishy smell gets even stronger because the result is not radioactive. The apparatus does not just produce A when it should produce B. It also happens that out of the the gazillion possible isotopes each element has, it only produces one of the few which are stable (i.e. not radioactive)


What this Rossi guy claims is that he can not just ignite a piece of wood by staring at it really hard, but that a fire started that way produces fresh mountain air instead of smoke.

Hmmm. How do you know this?

No "reported" cases perhaps?

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/fukushim...ent_inf129.html

One of many many articles.

I'll take a look at it. In the meantime, seeing as this link is to a page by the World Nuclear Association, is there something that is not produced by an organization with a vested interest in keeping us all happy with nuclear power?

EDIT: I see references to UN and WHO studies. I'll see if I can find those, too.

Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor

WHO preliminary study
Only one area is believed to have received "significant" doses but even there the assumptions taken were to maximize the potential dosage. Look particularly at section 3.2 on the top of p41 and note 1 at the bottom of p42. They increased the concentration based on an infants smaller size (which is correct) but then assumed that they breathed in the same amount of air as an adult (which is not). The other assumption is that people spent all their time outdoors and never went inside (which is ridiculous).

Thanks.

Won't somebody please think of the Free-Range Babies!!!

Cruelty free organic soylent green.

Thorium reactors, the aforementioned LFTR, IMHO are the way to go anyways, forget the hokey cold fusion fellow.

It has a rather interesting history of being a proven technology that was purposely stagnated in favour of the other methods of nuclear energy because those helped with the production of the bomb.

In particular once all the design costs are out of the way it becomes very easy to determine who wants cheap power and who wants nuclear weapons.

..because the Government evacuated large areas at tremendous cost. Sure such incidents are ultra-rare (same as another Seveso or Thalidomide). It's also extremely unlikely that I will ever cause so much damage with my car that I couldn't ever pay it back, but just in case I am required to have an insurance and need to factor the insurance premiums into the cost of owning a car.

As for the thorium reactors which get brought up every couple of years: Sure they would be great stuff...if we lived on a planet with an atmosphere of pure noble gas. As long as we don't, anything which involves significant amounts of superheated graphite is certainly not inherently safe. But inherent safety was the major promise of thorium technology, without that the cost/benefit ratio tanks heavily.
(We'd also need an alternative for concrete which does not release water vapor -- but that's something enough coffee and engineers can surely solve )

No buildup of energy in the graphite. A LFTR operates at or above 650C, well above the 250C Wigner annealing temperature of graphite. This prevents Wigner energy from forming in the graphite moderator. The continual annealing bleeds it off. A sudden release of Wigner energy is thus not possible. Therefore, a Windscale-style graphite-incited fire cannot be caused by the graphite's nonexistent Wigner energy. In addition, the graphite does not react with any of the materials found in a LFTR containment.

We'll considering that Hiroshima and Nagasaki had a high number of birth defects for many years after WWII ended, it may take a while to know the full scope of the damage. But my pops was given a "What to do in case of nuclear War" one of the things it noted was that the radiation levels would be safe at three weeks due to rain, wind and other effects dispersing the radioactivity along with the natural decay of the radioactive isotopes. By the way: "safe" meant that you might develop cancer years down the road, but you won't lose your hair and die in the next six months.

So if you're stockpiling to survive a nuclear war, it probably be best if you hunkered down for at least 6 months....

No its MAGIC!

Read the WHO's paper on radiation exposure from Fukushima - there weren't many receiving significant doses even in the worst case estimate.

Figured out why I had to ask that question.

LTFR != LFTR

For all the problems with nuclear reactors, a Chernobyl-scale event every 20 years would still result in fewer casualties than coal-fueled power.

Next time try thinking for a second before C&Ping something completely unrelated from WP...

The ignition temperature of carbon is 250-300°C. And as you posted yourself:

Now, what happens when a substance is heated well above its ignition temperature and then exposed to an oxidizer?

By the way, this effect was what made Chernobyl so bad. Once the initial explosion had destroyed the reactor building, the graphite moderator caught fire, and this fire swept tons of radioactive material into the atmosphere. So everybody who did some minor reading into reactor safety should know about the risk



Concrete always contains a certain quantity of water which can evaporate. And C + H₂O -> CO + H₂

Curiously, this is relevant.

http://206.188.212.108:8080/BoTPWeb/faces/Splash.xhtml

(Support the guy: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/544670...-of-the-planet/ )

@Sengir
http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com.au/2011/0...phite-burn.html
http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com.au/2011/0...actor-burn.html
http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com.au/2011/0...actor-burn.html

Read this in particular the last paragraphs of the third article about MSR.

"As we have seen, the use of graphite in a reactor core is consistent with safe reactor operations. The danger of a core fire due to graphite burning is quite limited. The time has now arrived to ask the question, is it dangerous to use graphite in the core of a Molten Salt Reactor.

We have already noted that the possibility of graphite fires in a reactor core can be eliminated by core design. In the case of Molten Salt Reactors, the possibility of a core fire is eliminated by the two modes of MSR operation. A MSR is only active if liquid salt is present in the core of the reactor. But if liquid salt is present then air cannot be. In the case of the presence of molten salt in the core, the presence of salt would prevent air from reaching the graphite. If the salt is drained, either deliberately, by accident or by operation of the freeze valve safety system, then the heat producing fission products will be drained from the core as well. The absence of fission products in the core would mean that a high enough temperature required to trigger a graphite fire would not be possible. Thus the use of graphite in a Molten Salt Reactor core would be inherently safe."

A MSR is either hot OR has oxygen not both.

So an advocacy group for thorium reactors is convinced that thorium reactors are safe because the coolant system keeps them cooled. Well, good thing nuclear accidents never involve a loss of cooling *facepalm*



I suggest you simply try this one out: Put a piece of charcoal into a hot liquid, let if boil for half an hour or so, then pour away the liquid and take the charcoal into your hand. Without gloves, since removing the hot medium will immediately make the charcoal drop to room temperature...

I suggest you watch the videos of nuclear grade graphite (ie pure carbon) at 1500C which is red hot and NOT burning. Also since the articles weren't about cooling systems my guess is you don't bother to read just spout your own brand of bias.

The graphite stack is protected by a helium cover gas contained within the shield structure. Combustion cannot occur unless the shield structure is sufficiently damaged to leak inert gas faster than available makeup supply. Should that occur, the rate of oxidation would be very slow because graphite temperatures would remain below the threshod for rapid oxidation because of heat removal from the stack by the ECCS [Emergency Core Cooling System] or the GSCS [Graphite and Shield Cooling System], The GSCS alone is capable of removing both decay heat and any heat load from graphite oxidation, stabilizing temperatures in a range which ensures control.]

But seeing how you apparently do not even read half a screen of something before you take it as evidence for whatever at least gives some indication how you got the idea that some preacher on blogspot must be an unrecognized genius. But don't worry, this particular brand of crank has managed to fool quite a few people...probably has something to do with their unyielding certainty even in the face of disasters like the AVR Jülich (which of course was only sabotaged by the Greens, the concept of a reactor with insufficient control rods that would spontaneously go critical if the coolant lines leaked was totally sound).

The article is about the safety of using graphite (as a moderator) in the reaction chamber but since there is a paragraph about the overall cooling system obviously that is the main topic. Also when an article quotes something from the DoE you may wish to include the entire quote so as not to provide biased posts.

"The graphite stack is protected by a helium cover gas contained within the shield structure. Combustion cannot occur unless the shield structure is sufficiently damaged to leak inert gas faster than available makeup supply. Should that occur, the rate of oxidation would be very slow because graphite temperatures would remain below the threshod for rapid oxidation because of heat removal from the stack by the ECCS [Emergency Core Cooling System] or the GSCS [Graphite and Shield Cooling System], The GSCS alone is capable of removing both decay heat and any heat load from graphite oxidation, stabilizing temperatures in a range which ensures control.

In the Chernobyl accident sequence, the plant was effectively destroyed and conditions for exothermic chemical reactions involving a number of core materials were present before graphite fire made any contribution. It is likely that the major contribution from graphite was to serve as a refractory container for decay heat buildup, zirconium oxidation along with carbothermic reduction of the UO2, and complex gas producing redox reactions. For any N Reactor accident where the GSCS and biological shield are intact, there is no way to achieve ignition of the graphite. It has been demonstrated experimentally that oxidation nuclear grade graphite takes very high temperatures to initiate, and the contribution to total heat load is only a small fraction of the decay heat.

Detailed reaction rate models have been developed to analyze graphite oxidation. These models tend to show that graphite oxidation in N Reactor would be limited both by available oxygen and the requirement that a high-temperature source (>1100°C) be available to drive a significant reaction. The analyses have effectively shown that graphite will not con-tribute significant accident heat loads.

The Chernobyl release must be viewed as resulting from both very high temperatures in the core rubble, extensive mechanical disruption and dispersal of core material and the large draft "chimney effect" that followed the total disruption of that particular reactor configuration. There is no accident sequence that could produce an equivalent disruption of N Reactor; there would be some confinement even in the lowest probability event sequences. Because of the horizontal arrangement of pressure tubes, Chernobyl fission product release rates and magnitude are not pertinent to N Reactor accident scenarios with mechanistic initiators."

But don't worry many people pay attention to doom-sayer cranks.

It has been said, that graphit fire (even if it would occure) won't be much of a problem. First of all the fission material would be at a different lokation. (In the case of cooling loss it is dropped down in storage containers)
Due to the fact, that he fission materials are mixed with the salt, (which is also the cooling fluid) dispearsing the salt over a bigger area will also reduce reaction speed of the fission process.

So an accident like chernobyl is really not possible.


The major issue with this ractor desgin are the corrosion of parts of the cooling system and problems with keeping the salt melted and reprocessing it (cleaning it up, getting unwanted fission products (Neutron poisons)out of it etc. pp)...

From what I gather one of the major benefits of fluoride over other molten salts is that it is less corrosive.

I never said it was, merely that saying "graphite is safe because it's kept cooled" is like saying that planes are inherently safe because aerodynamics keep an undamaged plane aloft in most circumstances.

Oh, and the fuel/coolant is an eutectic of both uranium fluoride and salt...using pure salt would make the nuclear reaction somewhat difficult...

???

That was referring to your "fluoride over other molten salts". Any pure compound would have a too high melting point, thus an eutectic is used.

So from what I've read do far, it's safe to say, nuclear reactor is safe.
Chernobyl accident was human error and bad planning. (97% of all accidents is human error)
A MSR would be just as safe if not safer then the "standard" reactors today.
The only concern with a MSR is corrosion and not melt down.
Where's the problem and why don't we buld a few?