988
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] Hugohase@startrek.website 11 points 1 week ago

Slow, expensive, riddeled with corruption, long ago surpassed by renewables. Why should we use it?

[-] mEEGal@lemmy.world 51 points 1 week ago

only antimatter could provide more energy density, it's insanely powerful.

produces amounts of waste orders of magnitude lower than any other means of energy production

reliable when done well

it shouldn't be replaced with renewables, but work with them

[-] Hugohase@startrek.website 11 points 1 week ago

Yes, but energy density doesn't matter for most applications and the waste it produces is highly problematic.

[-] Remotedeck@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 1 week ago

If something is Nuclear enough it can generate heat, its just the reactors make use of an actual reaction that nuclear waste can't do anymore. Yever watch the Martian, he has a generator that's fuel is lead covered beads of radioactive material, it doesn't generate as much as reactors but it's still a usable amount.

[-] rtxn@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

If something is Nuclear enough it can generate heat

That's an extreme oversimplification. RTGs don't use nuclear waste. Spent reactor fuel still emits a large amount of gamma and neutron radiation, but not with enough intensity to be useful in a reactor. The amount of shielding required makes any kind of non-terrestrial application impossible.

The most common RTG fuel is plutonium (^238^Pu, usually as PuO~2~), which emits mostly alpha and beta particles, and can be used with minimal shielding. It can't be produced by reprocessing spent reactor fuel. In 2024, only Russia is manufacturing it. Polonium (^210^Po) is also an excellent fuel with a very high energy density, but it has a prohibitively short half-life of just over a hundred days. It also has to be manufactured and can't be extracted.

^90^Sr (strontium) can be extracted from nuclear fuel, and was used by early Soviet RTGs, but only terrestrially because the gamma emission requires heavy shielding. Strontium is also a very reactive alkaline metal. It isn't used as RTG fuel today.

[-] rtxn@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago
load more comments (29 replies)
load more comments (88 replies)
this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2024
988 points (86.4% liked)

Science Memes

11189 readers
2729 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.



Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS