Nuclear waste as fuel less heat energy.

[Nevlaar]

Put it in lead lined capsules to make a fuel less heat source that will go on for decades.

[swansont]

Can you expand on this idea?

[Raider5678]

Are you implying we put nuclear waste inside of lead lined capsules to stop the radiation, And with the resulting heat from that make a heat source?

Edited July 20, 2016 by Raider5678

[Externet]

Subject visited before, at least once...

 

----> http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/77559-heat-left-in-nuclear-spent-fuel/?hl=spent

[geordief]

Pocket hand warmers?

 

Seriously though ,the nuclear industry needs good propaganda . This idea would be meat and two veg to the anti nuclear lobbyists.

 

Personally nuclear power is a last resort (which is where I think we are at with global warming at the present).

[swansont]

Subject visited before, at least once...

 

----> http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/77559-heat-left-in-nuclear-spent-fuel/?hl=spent

 

 

 

The upshot of that was you get a lot of power right away, but it drops off, so there doesn't seem to be a consistent application of such an item. When the half-life is too short the useful life of the product is short, with a fairly steep drop in the power output. Too long and you need a large amount of the stuff to generate a reasonable power level. Unprocessed waste includes a mix of the two, combining the drawbacks.

 

A substance used for power generation (and warmth in The Martian) is Pu-238 with an 87.7 year half-life, so the drop in power is reasonably gradual. Sr-90 is also used in this kind of application, with a 28.8 year half-life. Those isotopes have relatively benign shielding requirements. There are other isotopes that could be used.

[MigL]

The last place I'd wanna keep possibly radioactive materials is in my pockets as hand warmers.

They'd be right next to your 'nads or ovaries.

You wanna have normal kids, don't you ?

[Sensei]

The last place I'd wanna keep possibly radioactive materials is in my pockets as hand warmers.

They'd be right next to your 'nads or ovaries.

You wanna have normal kids, don't you ?

 

Radioactive materials are everywhere. Also in your body.

The questions are

1) in what quantity

2) what is half-life

3) what is decay energy

4) whether products/byproducts are radioactive or not

5) do you have luck or do you not. Theoretically just one decaying particle is needed to destroy DNA in such way that it'll start mutating in unpredictable way.

 

Couple common places were you can find radioactive materials f.e.:

- Americium-241 smoke detector

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americium-241

- Potassium/Carbon rich food

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potassium-40

Banana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose

 

For an exercise one can calculate amount of Carbon-14 and Potassium-40 which will give 1 W.

Edited July 20, 2016 by Sensei

[Externet]

In a speculative posibility of some certain nuclear spent fuel could provide heat for a dwelling; would it be possible to 'shut it off' in summer and 'hold it' for winter use only ?

[swansont]

In a speculative posibility of some certain nuclear spent fuel could provide heat for a dwelling; would it be possible to 'shut it off' in summer and 'hold it' for winter use only ?

 

 

No. Decay doesn't work like that.

[Sensei]

You would need induced radioactivity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_radioactivity

f.e. Deuterium can be split on demand to free proton and free neutron, it requires 2.22 MeV energy at least,

free neutron is absorbed by some other element around,

but newly produced isotope can be unstable,

and decay soon releasing even more energy than invested to split Deuterium in the first stage.

Neutron activation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_activation

Edited July 21, 2016 by Sensei

[John Cuthber]

I think there's a problem...

"Dear sir,

I saw your product advertised on the web. Please send me 500 watts worth of radioactive material. I'm not too concerned about the half life.

Kind regards

John Smith

PS I'm definitely not a terrorist seeking to make a dirty bomb- certainly not- the idea would never even occur to me"

[Enthalpy]

At least one plant in China produces heat with waste. Difficulties:

• On a big scale, you'd connect the future victims to the radioactivity source with hookahs.
• Or convert the heat into electricity, but the power is small. Fission produces 200MeV per U burnt in 1 year, plus two radioisotopes that produce 1MeV in 30 years. At equilibrium it must be under 1% of the fission energy, not worth the engineering.
• On a small scale, near the use, you'd still need a radiation shield almost as thick as with a big source.

It exists for space probes in the form of ²³⁸Pu (which isn't waste) because this one emits no gammas, so thin shielding is enough.

 

The other nuclides, including the ⁹⁰Sr waste, emit gammas. Either themselves, or their childrens do, or the betas they emit do it when braked by the radioactive material or by the shield. ⁹⁰Sr has been used to power lone lighthouses in the Soviet union, and despite some thick shielding, two siberian hunters who had spent the night around the heat source died subsequently from the radiations.

[swansont]

The other nuclides, including the ⁹⁰Sr waste, emit gammas. Either themselves, or their childrens do, or the betas they emit do it when braked by the radioactive material or by the shield. ⁹⁰Sr has been used to power lone lighthouses in the Soviet union, and despite some thick shielding, two siberian hunters who had spent the night around the heat source died subsequently from the radiations.

Not despite the shielding. It was because they (or someone else) opened the container and defeated the shielding.

http://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/radiothermal-generators-containing-strontium-90-discovered-liya-georgia/

 

"According to NTV and Interfax, the three men had broken through the lead, tungsten, concrete, and ferrous layers that shielded the strontium-90, while the New York Times reported that the men found the cylinders laying in the snow."

 

They had apparently been using the lead from the shielding; 20 kg of it was found elsewhere.