Nuclear reactor breeder setup

There are two types of breeder reactors that have been proposed. The first, the fast breeder reactor, uses an initial fuel charge of plutonium, thereafter only requiring natural uranium for energy. A few prototypes have been built of fast breeders, and Japan, China, Korea, and Russia are all committing funds towards continued development.

The second type of breeder reactor is a thermal breeder reactor, which uses an initial fuel charge of enriched uranium, thereafter using only thorium. Thermal breeder reactors have only been built on a small scale thus far, with India taking the first steps towards industrial-scale development, having begun in Michael is a longtime InfoBloom contributor who specializes in topics relating to paleontology, physics, biology, astronomy, chemistry, and futurism.

In addition to being an avid blogger, Michael is particularly passionate about stem cell research, regenerative medicine, and life extension therapies. I went downtown instead and had some fun with my friends. You have to go look it up! You know how to make a nuclear reactor, right? I figured that Connor had slept maybe thirty minutes in the last seventy-two hours, and it was only Thursday morning.

His tone bounced somewhere between desperate and manic. I explained that a nuclear reactor is a complex device, and that the physics involved is too complicated for a Scav Hunt item. He answered that the item was worth, like, infinity points and that if we Justin and I built something, Mathews would totally win.

Back then, Mathews House was its own team, and all forty-five or so of us faced the barbarian hordes alone. Much has been written about David RIP in the intervening twenty-plus years, but in the end he did accomplish something in his garden shed. He had assembled a neutron source of some impressive strength for a total amateur, and when unleashed, it met the loosest definition of a nuclear reactor one can imagine.

An idea was seeded in my brain. No hello or anything. The rumor mill was already in full swing. By recycling this product, it is able to efficiently generate a large amount of nuclear power, which is why these reactors were popular in the first place.

So be prepared. By now it was Thursday night. J came home from work and we talked about the idea over a few beers. We agreed that we could use a simple, highly active alpha source to create a weak neutron howitzer that could, in turn, create thermal neutrons. Just like what we used in our physics lab experiments. From there we could make small quantities of whatever isotopes we wanted. All we needed was a proportional tube and a pulse height analyzer, a NIM crate with preamps and high-voltage power supply, and a few check sources to do a rock-solid calibration.

I already had a good alpha source a few microcuries of radium from World War II—surplus aircraft gauges and thorium dioxide from the inside of junk vacuum tubes from old TVs that we had salvaged. All we really needed was analytical equipment to verify that it all worked.

And that he had photos of the thieves. We thanked him and carted the junk off to our dorm room. That night, Justin and I went out to Fermilab to pick up some radiation bunny suits before disappearing into the machine shop.

We soldered together some pieces of scrap metal to make an appropriate holder for the radium and thermalizing carbon sheets. It was mostly built of aluminum scrap pieces, but you know—even a boring piece of aluminum I-beam looks impressive with a bit of ingenuity and some face milling.

We assembled the main reactor around eight or nine on Saturday night. By midnight we had finished the energy calibration of the detector.

Since our neutron source the thing driving the nuclear reactions was laughably weak, we needed to be able to detect down to a single atom whether or not we had indeed created the reactions associated with a breeder reaction. By two or three in the morning we had detected the characteristic radiation from neutron capture of thorium, and from there we knew that it was just a waiting game.

We had created the highly fissile isotope of uranium from garbage found under our dorm room workbench. Optimize for power. Optimize for breeding maximize fuel consumption rate. Optimize for efficiency.

X symmetry Y symmetry Z symmetry Use reinforcement learning requires more memory, slightly slower but can produce better design The most efficient reactor doesn't produce the most power. To get the ideal cell count, divide the fuel's base processing time by the time you want a fuel to last. You can use Building Gadgets to automate the building of your reactor.

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