Quote from Promethian

Hi,

After a recent thread about what may have happened at Chernobyl in regards to excessive nuclear resonance, I figured I would start a thread about a hypothetical nuclear reactor based on the principles of control rod resonance.

This hypothetical reactor would probably last for hundreds of years without changing the fuel composition or in other words, the control rods would be maintained at the same rate of resonance as to prevent the fuel from degrading. Can anyone surmise if this is possible?

I further hypothesize that a resonance reactor would be utilized for direct energy production. Hypothetically, the reactors would create a monopole that would allow (from both sides) to produce direct energy production.

I wonder if anyone else thinks this is possible or if any of this makes sense. I predict that such a reactor could utilize already spent fuel (although more complex to maintain) to enrich it to the appropriate state.

Hoping on some interesting thoughts about the issue.

As a side note, here is one such reactor already proposed some 30 years ago: https://www.iaea.org/inis/coll…c/39/059/39059924.pdf?r=1

Thanks.

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A quite interesting proposal, this is possible as part of a molten salt fission reactor? I also was thinking, the Chernobyl incident as you said was hotter or had features that it shouldn't have had without resonant effects?? Nuclear fuel and such are in the actinide metal group of elements. Many in this transition element subgroup are hydrogen loving themselves and could possibly produce exotic quantum chemical reactions with H isotopes enabling atom-like compounds, as well as the fission overload that was initiated due to mismanagement. There was water.

This discussion is very interesting. Military reactors are usually charged with an excess of reactivity. This reactivity is tamed with “burnable poisons”. (I don’t know the name in English) During the life of the ship, the poison disappear by neutron capture, and in the same time the fissile isotopes are burned, and poison fission products are created, so the reactivity of the reactor could be maintained constant over dozen of years.

This is convenient for the military, because profitability considerations are not taken into account.

But it’s a complete waste of neutrons. The neutrons absorbed by the "consumable poisons" are lost. We'd better control the reactor by acting on the neutron spectrum. At the start of operation, some of the spaces between the fuel rods would be used to pass steel or tungsten bars. These bars would be extended by a part made up of glucine. The part consisting of glucin would be located outside the core at the start of operation. These bars would not moderate the neutron spectrum. The fuel would be MOX. The coolant would be a lead / bismuth eutectic. Neutrons would be absorbed by resonance in uranium 238, and a little part in plutonium, but this is of no importance since all isotopes of plutonium are fissile. We are then in a fast, and breeder regime.

As the years go by, the neutron poisons will build up, and the reactivity will go down, and the steel bars will gradually be taken out of the heart, and the part of the glucine will enter the heart. (Of course, half of the bars will be pulled up, and the other half down, to avoid an imbalance in the reactor.)(half of the bars will be glucine up, and the other glucine down)

The more the glucine is introduced into the reactor, the more we will go into thermal neutron mode. A reactor cooled by bismuth in thermal mode! It is likely that this will make the best use of uranium.

But obviously, there are a few small problems to solve: driving in fast mode at the start will probably be very delicate, and unfortunately, bismuth captures neutrons to form polonium. Better to avoid putting it in your coffee.

Yes, the graphite is a very bad moderator, even if it is made with very pure carbon (smoke black). After a few years, it is completely Wignerized. If you take it out in the open, it ignites spontaneously. If you're lucky it doesn't ignite right away, it absorbs oxygen from the air, and at the slightest shock, it will explode.

This is why the French avoid touching graphite in their old reactors. There was a forced air cooled reactor near the Rhône river, I think the graphite has been there for 65 years. It was a 50 megawatt air-cooled reactor, like at Windscale. For the fun, it was installed a steam engine to produce some electricity, but the fans consumed more power than the alternator produced.

The design of the reactor was imagined by Léon Kowarski at the start of the war. But the French reactor did not have a sand filter on its chimney, and the radioactivity (if any) was dispersed over the agglomeration of Marseille to the sea by the strong wind from Provence, which is called the Mistral.

Graphite from English reactors of the lake district, too, was in shelter-in-place for 80 years.

He guys did you ever hear about nuclear waste ???

Fission is dead until we know how to LENR treat the nuclear waste!

True.

https://patentimages.storage.g…662a2c447/FR2729249A1.pdf

Quote from Promethian

Only that, graphite is such a poor moderator, that I believe (ehem) hydrogen itself would be an ideal moderator along with a mixture of other elements absorbing and reflecting the neutron influx. I believe the most dangerous reactor designs are graphite based and gasious moderators are ideal for this purpose, and can even be mixed with a MOX fuel composition. Don't go too far with this concept though... You don't want to kettle to boil over.

This could end up as a fission heated LENR or pico-chemical reactor especially with the addition of hydrogen with the actinides and high tempuratures. The medium initiation energy, nuclear particle shuffling free, hydrogen/metal reactions stimulated by such a set up could help stabilize or accelerate the decay of fission reaction products whether the interaction is directly nuclear or deep within the atom's electron bosom. All unfolding more compact energy extraction methods made possible by expected electromagnetic effects from novel co-reactions. Possibly.

Quote from Promethian

Please, nobody get carried away. There are some very dangerous applications to this idea.

🤗 Well I hope it is used disproportinately through productive and peaceful means. Danger is a part of life and high energy levels in general. I wouldn't be here if I wasn't for a general increase in safer, sustainable, and higher energy density human tech. Idk exactly where you are going with your series of threads? Your profile name I like it...🤔

Very interesting article in Hindawi. I knew that the French fuel “MOX” (“Mixed Oxide” containing 7% plutonium diluted in depleted uranium) could have four combustion modes: moderated/delayed, moderated/prompt, rapid/delayed and rapid/prompt, depending on the geometry of fuel rods. Obviously the correct operating mode is: moderated/delayed.

But in Fukushima, the Japanese didn't have enough space to store the new MOX core in the pool. Since it did not emit heat, they stored it on the concrete technical level (refuelling floor) , into racks. But as this fuel quickly becomes relatively radioactive (because of the decay products of the higher isotopes of plutonium, because it is plutonium "reactor-grade"), the Japanese built a small silo-bunker with concrete blocks stacked like LEGO bricks, with the overhead crane, in a corner of the technical level (refuelling floor) . This is in order to protect workers who walk on the technical floor. During the first hydrogen explosion, the shock wave threw the concrete blocks against the new MOX fuel assemblies located on the technical panel, in these improvised "silos". The geometry of the storage was therefore degraded (to put it mildly) and the assemblies came into rapid prompt criticality. It is a mode of operation to be avoided in priority, because when one passes from the ambient temperature to 4000/5000 Kelvins, the effective section of fission of plutonium passes from 650 barns to 1350 barns, and the speed of reaction increases. (This is what happens in a bomb, this is why we can reduce the critical mass of plutonium to less than 3.6 kg, provided that it is heated during compression.) Sorry, these data were not published in Geneva in 1955 and in 1958, find out why, probably an oversight.

Graphite reactors are very dangerous, for many reasons. After several years of irradiation, graphite is no longer the beautiful graphite in physics books, composed of beautiful graphene sheets wisely stacked on top of each other.

It became a non-regular solid, with bizarre cycles of 4 or 3 carbon atoms, acetylene chain links, in short, something very unstable and very charged with energy. If you drop it on the ground, it will spontaneously heat up and catch fire. (Admitting that you can take it in your hands because it is very radioactive) (Yes, graphite is a real sponge: it fixes all the radioelements that are in the heart of the reactor.)

We can heat the graphite to 250/400 degrees Celsius to break all these unstable bonds, but it then forms a kind of carbon "foam" in three dimensions: the different graphene planes are connected by sorts of "wormholes " It is very useful as a material for making new sodium batteries, but it is very combustible, because it greedily stores oxygen.

That’s why you cannot move graphite from old reactors. In my opinion, the best would be to depressurize the core and then let the vacuum draw water with a little acrylamide in it, or kerosene containing a polymerizable monomer, or better, linseed oil (in order to perfom a "bioremediation"...) . Then we would get solid blocks that we could break for a jackhammer. The granules would then be mixed with clay, put in cans and sent to the underground storage center of Bure, 500 meters below the vineyard of Champagne. (There is room for all the radioactive graphite in the world, including the graphite of Hanford and Windscale.)

The first French atomic pile has been in this hangar since 1947, and the graphite is still there. He has NEVER been dewignerized. Indeed, it was a heavy water cell, the graphite just served as a reflector. It’s in an old military fort on the outskirts of Paris.

With regard to graphite and light water reactors, Oppenheimer was the first to realize their dangerousness. This is why Groves chose the Hanford site, which is far from everything.

Oppenheimer had recommended NEVER to vary the power, except for compelling reasons, and that is why, once diverged, these reactors were not stopped. The uranium bars were pushed by hand to one side, there was a sort of airlock to prevent the water so as to shower the operators, or else the tubes were emptied one by one, I don't know, and all the uranium cartridges were pushed with a crowbar, and the irradiated cartridges fell on the other side into wagons full of water. I suppose that the last cartridges blocked the tube and prevented water from flowing on the rear face of the reactor as in Niagara. And then the wagons lefted, smoking, to the plutonium extraction complexes, a few miles away.

At first, the uranium cartridges were NOT encased in aluminum, and obviously it was a little radioactive. The water had to be de-activated off in tanks to avoid killing the fish with short-lived radioelements. Iodine and xenon left through ventilation, but the other radioactive elements remained.

Ditto for the PUREX nitric acid dissolution tanks: they were in the open air, in concrete "canyons" and all the iodine and xenon went into the air. Then, the liquid effluents were pumped into more or less watertight concrete tanks, and the nitrates ended up settling in the ground under the tank. It’s the best thing to do. The Russians had much more tight tanks, and in the end, the nitrate crystals ended up depositing at the bottom, and as there is always a little kerosene in micellar solution in these radioactive tributaries, it is not good for security.

Oppenheimer and Groves had chosen the ideal place, and the English too, but in France, we do not have many deserts, and scientists do not like to leave Paris, theaters, cinemas, museums and good restaurants , and nuclear power does not scare anyone, so we built the first plutonium production and extraction plant 15 kilometers from Notre-Dame. Guess where we put the radioactive effluents? There was already a tradition of nuclear industry in the area for 50 years, there were three radium factories, and the Pechblende which came from Czechoslovakia was dissolved in acid to extract radium, and then as the effluents were mainly made up of nitrate, which is an excellent fertilizer, they were bought by the gardeners of the "diary belt" of Paris, to cultivate salads or asparagus. There was a little polonium, thorium, Francium, radium and uranium in it, but that doesn't kill the carots.

Quote from fabrice DAVID

but that doesn't kill the carots.

In Japan carrots sound like humans... ninjin versus ningen..

Foreigner blooper.. I,m just cutting up the ningen for salad

Nowhere in Japan is radioactivity safe.. given tsunamis and earthquakes..

https://www.forbes.com/sites/j…o-the-ocean/#7c5f3ac6b298

Why not? Nice experiment to do with hexafluoride. Please send us your drawing. Some years ago, the Cogema company (former Framatome, then AREVA, and now ORANO) used to park railroad cars loaded with pressurized recycled uranium hexafluoride containers on a siding railway at Ermont-Eaubonne commuter train station, near my home. It was a little radioactive, because there is uranium 236 in it and still a bit of transuranium elements. The wagons were then sent to Calais, and from there they were shipped by ferry-boat to Léningrad, and then the Russians re-enriched the uranium and sended back the 3.5% 235U to France. (also enriched in 236U unfortunately.) In France, we do not re-enrich recycled uranium, to avoid polluting the pipes at the gas diffusion plant which the Iranians had paid for. (This factory is named after the engineer they had murdered a few years after construction: Georges Besse plant.) They also killed his daughter. They killed many people in France for having the enriched uranium that we promised the shah. Bad business…

The cars weren't kept by security guards at night, (and even at day) they were behind the municipal swimming pool, one night they were tagged by young street artists. I believe there was a leak, because large concrete walls were built in this place there now. (I'm going to take a photo today, I'll post it tomorrow.)

But let’s return to your experiment with uranium: uranium hydrides could be interesting too. According to my hypothesis of Diafluidity, protons (or deuterons) could get a very low temperatures at some crystallographic locations which I called “freezers”. At other places (called by Professor Dauxois “Breathers”) uranium atoms could be “hotter”, with obvious effect on resonance cross section of fission.

This hypothesis has important consequences in nuclear physics, not only theorically: a team from the famous Los Alamos laboratories has discovered that in a block of uranium alloy, some atoms are actually "hotter" than others (M. E. Manley et al. Formation of a New Dynamical Mode in alpha-Uranium Observed by Inelastic X-Ray and Neutron Scattering, Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 125501 (2006).

This discovery has obvious consequences since the cross section of fission precisely depends on the temperature. In general, the higher the temperature of a nuclear reactor, the lower the number of fissions, because the neutron spectrum covers the area of "capture resonance lines" (all other things being equal). This is what gives intrinsic stability to well-designed nuclear reactors. If quasicrystalline phases leading to breathers/freezers couples appear at some temperatures, an abrupt variation in reactivity must be observed, whereas conventional neutronics provides for a relatively continuous variation in this reactivity. This effect must be able to be highlighted easily, if attention is paid to its detection.

Before building the ZOE reactor near Paris, Leon Kowarski build the same reactor in Canada during the war, which diverged before the English and French reactors. I like the little house of Charles Ingals next to the barn which contains the reactor, it looks like the house of the television series "The Little House On the Prairie". Guess what’s in the big concrete tank on the south?

These heavy water research reactors are stable: if the heavy water starts to boil, the reaction stops, and the fuel is not very radioactive, the core cannot melt. But light water-cooled graphite reactors and light water-cooled heavy water reactors are highly unstable. The biggest they are, the biggest the instability.

I the beautiful bank of the river near this little reactor, the Canadians built the reactor NRX some years after. There was a little shortage in heavy water at this times, so the they choose light water as a coolant. Bad choice.

The problem at the old French pile near Paris is the graphite reflector (one meter thick, completely Wignerized)

There is a part of refractory material in the center of the K15 PWR nuclear reactor. This material is heated by the neutrons. This part is NOT cooled, except by the vapour made in the boiler. Fortunately, after à debate, the engineers choose (depleted?) uranium carbide instead of graphite. (Xena reactor of the CDG carrier) This allow an higher temperature of the vapour, with no increase of the pressure inside the reactor. The vapour is “dryied”, and the “vapour noise” in the turbine is lowered, this is good for stealth hability and the yield of the reactor is higher. (It is a Romanian invention made by Constantin Haiduk. I have is book in my library.) In theory, there is no need to change the combustible during the life of the boat, but in reality, it is prudent to re-open the cuve every ten years to change the bars. But it is tedious, because the cuve is not bolted, but soldered.

The PERLE nuclear attack submarine was completely destroyed by a fire in Toulon military harbour (France) this morning. Contrary to the declarations of the Minister of Defense, the core was in process of decharching/recharging with 22% enriched fuel and many of the nuclear torpedoes as well as the cruise missiles were in their racks and in their silos, with the exception of a few units withdrawn for decommissioning or maintenance .

The submarine which is now a radioactive wreck also contained several ion-exchange resin containers saturated with radioelements. We are still awaiting the official classification of this disaster on the IAEA scale. Suggest U to take iodin pills if U live in Cöte d'Azur.

Yes, you're right, they will tow it by a tug, probably the "Abeille Flandre", while she comes full speed from Brest harbour, they will pass the Columns of Hercules during the night and then they will sink the boat in a deep Atlantic pit . It’s the best thing to do now. The holidays are coming, they can't afford to ruin the tourist season.

I believe that the Perle (Pearl) is too big to enter one of the concrete cells of the bases of German submarines of Bordeaux, Saint-Nazaire or Lorient, otherwise, it would have been a good idea. It would have been enough to fill the cell with concrete around the submarine. The Lorient base is a bunker 500 meters long and 30 meters high.