VeganPizza69 ⓋNew research shows renewables are more profitable than nuclear power
thewutWith newer nuclear reactors that use helium or thorium to contain the temperature (the type that do not need water to regulate reaction)
You can produce plasma from anything and run it through a giant magnet (like in fusion) but with nuclear to generate electricity directly.
Helium is the only element in the periodic table that is non renewable.
idk how accurate this is but i’ve heard a tale, that the military is hoarding all it can and pumping it waaaay underground to store what’s left… but i still keep seeing dollar stores and walmart selling cans and pumping up balloons… i am not familiar with the raw process of capturing/mining helium enough to say anything about it.
Different isotypes the one you buy for baloons is not the same type thags used in nuclear reactors
America had huge reserves but released majority of it decades ago
The last helium from the National Helium Reserve is being auctioned off this November along with helium enrichment equipment, pipelines, and some office buildings too. Get your bid in!
Sir I would like one helium please
There was a strategic helium reserve that the US government operated, but it was defunded and drawn down to depletion because of capitalism (gov’t doing it means corpos can’t make $$$ doing the same thing for twelve times the price).
The National Helium Reserve was started in the 1920s to store helium for military airships and barrage balloons; but airplane technology got a lot better and so we don’t use airships or even many balloons for military purposes anymore. So the original purpose of the reserve never turned out to be all that useful.
Helium is found alongside natural gas, and there is still plenty of helium production in the US. Until we get a real room-temperature superconductor, every MRI machine consumes liquid helium for cooling. This and other industrial uses make it profitable for natural gas producers to keep extracting helium.
That sounds like “pie in the sky”:
The problem with fusion reactor is exactly the containment of the plasma and avoiding that it dissipates its heat through light emission.
If that was solved we would be better off doing fusion since deuterium (a heavier form of hydrogen atoms because it has 1 neutron in the nucleous) can simply be extracted from the water and the H+H fusion reaction releases more energy than any fission reactions (and, funilly enough, would produce the much rarer helium that’s needed for those reactors of yours).
The problem with fusion reactors is exactly the containment of the plasma and avoiding that it dissipates its heat through light emission.
That’s one problem. Neutron embrittlement is another.
Yeah, I was just addressing the previous post.
In all fairness I only checked what’s going on with fusion once in a while as my background is Physics (as in, I started a degree in it and then ended up going to EE because in my home country there really only are jobs for theoretical physicists, not the more hands-on kind) and hence only know it at a superficial level (of somebody with the background to understand Particle Physics but not a domain expert).
Yeah, I do know about the embrittlement of the container walls due to neutron emission from the fusion reaction (no idea how bad or not that is compared to the rest), but last I check plasma containment was still a bit of a problem as was the plasma cooling through photon emission (mind you, that might not be as much of a problem for the kind of temperature of the plasma the previous poster was mentioning, which - I assume - are less that what’s need to induce fusion).
That said, all in all it just sounds strange to use fusion to generate a plasma - I mean, bloody fire generates a plasma (which is what the flame is - so I don’t quite see the point of it. That whole thing sounded a bit too much like “fancy sciency words thrown around to deceive the ignorant”.