In other news...

[Cygnia]

Adult Film Star Ron Jeremy Fighting to Save Tree Outside His Childhood Home in Queens

[Michael Hopcroft]

On 5/18/2020 at 1:57 PM, Bazza said:

Scientists Create a Prototype 'Air Plasma' Engine That Works Without Fossil Fuels

And how do they generate the microwaves. hmm? Some form of electricity, no doubt, so where does the electricity come from, eh?

[Badger]

Don't ruin their good feelings, by making the scientists thnk

[Old Man]

41 minutes ago, Michael Hopcroft said:

And how do they generate the microwaves. hmm? Some form of electricity, no doubt, so where does the electricity come from, eh?

 

Batteries?  Wind?  Solar?  Sorry, was this a trick question?

[Ternaugh]

47 minutes ago, Michael Hopcroft said:

And how do they generate the microwaves. hmm? Some form of electricity, no doubt, so where does the electricity come from, eh?

 

That's simple. You just use the electrical output from the jet engines. 😁

[Michael Hopcroft]

it is a trick question, sort of, because it asks "What is the fuel source that will generate enough power to keep feeding this thing microwaves in mid-air for the eight+ hours it takes to get from New York to London?" I'm sure that within the aircraft they will have a battery of some sort, but it has to be charged between flights. The tick is that you need to generate the electricity somehow -- it doesn't generate itself.

[pinecone]

1 hour ago, Michael Hopcroft said:

And how do they generate the microwaves. hmm? Some form of electricity, no doubt, so where does the electricity come from, eh?

Could be Hydrogen, or solar, or nuke...

[Cancer]

Yup, anything else.

 

That is the point: You can generate thrust without burning fossil fuel, and thereby injecting fresh hot CO2 into the atmosphere.  Obviously you still need a power source.

 

Now, I am not entirely clear about whether leaving a trail of hot ionization behind you from your microwave rocket is better or worse than hot CO2, but at lesat in principle you have an option to discuss now.

[Cancer]

More possible leads into matter-antimatter asymmetry

 

I have not seen the journal paper leading into this, and this source is a bit more rah-rah than I like.

 

But I figured "pear-shaped nuclei" would be good for raised eyebrows at least.

[Badger]

23 minutes ago, pinecone said:

Could be Hydrogen, or solar, or nuke...

 

Unicorn flatulence?  or would the methane be bad for the atmosphere.

[Badger]

2 minutes ago, Cancer said:

More possible leads into matter-antimatter asymmetry

 

I have not seen the journal paper leading into this, and this source is a bit more rah-rah than I like.

 

But I figured "pear-shaped nuclei" would be good for raised eyebrows at least.

 

But, the boom from matter/antimatter is so much fun.

[Cancer]

Well, even my department chair says he tries to avoid mixing those.

[Zeropoint]

2 hours ago, Michael Hopcroft said:

And how do they generate the microwaves. hmm? Some form of electricity, no doubt, so where does the electricity come from, eh?

 

A small nuclear power plant would be the obvious choice.

[Sociotard]

A little tourist stop near me has the prototype they made for a nuclear airplane.

[Zeropoint]

It really sticks in my craw that public opinion of nuclear power has been permanently damaged by a few isolated incidents that all stemmed from egregiously poor decisions. The people behind Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island are responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths via the effects of global warming, and in all three of those cases, it's because they blatantly failed to follow good engineering principles--deliberately, knowingly, and culpably failed.

[Cancer]

I am not in favor of putting a reactor in an aircraft; they fall out of the sky way too easily and way too catastrophically, for reasons that don't have to have anything to do with the reactor itself.  But other kinds of power plants are available; maybe not off the shelf for this application at this time, but developing hardware solutions is what engineers do.

[Cancer]

Just now, Zeropoint said:

It really sticks in my craw that public opinion of nuclear power has been permanently damaged by a few isolated incidents that all stemmed from egregiously poor decisions. The people behind Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island are responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths via the effects of global warming, and in all three of those cases, it's because they blatantly failed to follow good engineering principles--deliberately, knowingly, and culpably failed.

 

At a high enough level, all three situations were ultimately caused by groupthink of various sorts. 

 

At Fukushima it is clear that the political environment, dominated by the corporate hierarchy, was the entirety of the reasons why the technical principles were ignored both before and during the accident.  I have not read as much about the Chernobyl disaster as I have about Fukushima, but for some reason in that case the on-site personnel took it upon themselves to perform experiments that were at best badly conceived with that reactor with its positive void coefficient.  At Three Mile Island, in retrospect it is clear that it did not occur to the operators for multiple days that some of the sensor systems they were relying on might not be operating correctly, which led to judgment errors while the accident was in process and aggravated the ultimate outcome.  I have read even less about TMI than Chernobyl, so I don't know whether it was bad training or a pathological group psychology that led to the failure to suspect sensor failures until too late.

[Zeropoint]

5 minutes ago, Cancer said:

I am not in favor of putting a reactor in an aircraft; they fall out of the sky way too easily and way too catastrophically, for reasons that don't have to have anything to do with the reactor itself.

 

That is the obvious sticking point, isn't it? There's been a lot of work being done on "small modular reactors" and I have to wonder if it might not be possible to put one of them in a crash-rated box and still come out ahead of fossil fuels.

 

2 minutes ago, Cancer said:

I have read even less about TMI than Chernobyl, so I don't know whether it was bad training or a pathological group psychology that led to the failure to suspect sensor failures until too late.

 

I may be remembering wrong but I seem to recall that TMI involved a control panel where a valve position was indicated by the position the valve had been ordered to go to, and NOT by reading the actual position of the valve. As I understand it, a valve got stuck and operators didn't know what position it was actually in, and this led to the release of radio-activated steam.

[Cancer]

You remember more about Three Mile Island than I do.  It did have an inordinately large public impact, I agree with you there.

 

As for "small modular reactors" ... I admit to deep suspicions.  There is no incentive for the maker of such things to be truthful about what happens at the end of its operating life.  They count on selling a pig in a poke, and you can't make them not do that.

 

Really the critical problem with fission reactors is that the expensive, difficult part comes after all the economic good from it has been extracted.  Once you have all that neutron-activated junk of the old reactor core and coolant and containment vessel that has served out its productive life, you have a messy, dangerous, and expensive job to deal with it.  This rear-loading of the big expense is absolutely, entirely guaranteed to be something that is antithetical to what the corporate model is now: that whole model explicitly includes walking away before the expense hits, through various measures including going through bankruptcy protection, golden parachutes for executives, and leaving the expensive profitless mess for some sucker to handle, invariably something in the public sector.

[Lord Liaden]

4 hours ago, Michael Hopcroft said:

And how do they generate the microwaves. hmm? Some form of electricity, no doubt, so where does the electricity come from, eh?

 

Would you really need that much of an onboard power source, though? You have plasma, a superb conductor that's magnetically reactive, being ejected at high velocity. If you put a magnetic field around it as it passes through the engine, wouldn't their interaction generate an electric current? That would supplement your energy needs for the microwave projectors. With enough plasma that might even be self-sustaining, such that you'd only need enough battery power to start the plasma flow.

[Cancer]

MHD as your onboard power source.  Nice, but computationally intensive.

[Zeropoint]

1 hour ago, Lord Liaden said:

Would you really need that much of an onboard power source, though? You have plasma, a superb conductor that's magnetically reactive, being ejected at high velocity. If you put a magnetic field around it as it passes through the engine, wouldn't their interaction generate an electric current? That would supplement your energy needs for the microwave projectors. With enough plasma that might even be self-sustaining, such that you'd only need enough battery power to start the plasma flow.

 

Are you familiar with the principle of conservation of energy?

 

What you're describing violates it quite badly.

[IndianaJoe3]

On 5/19/2020 at 11:45 PM, Lord Liaden said:

 

Would you really need that much of an onboard power source, though? You have plasma, a superb conductor that's magnetically reactive, being ejected at high velocity. If you put a magnetic field around it as it passes through the engine, wouldn't their interaction generate an electric current? That would supplement your energy needs for the microwave projectors. With enough plasma that might even be self-sustaining, such that you'd only need enough battery power to start the plasma flow.

 

The energy's gotta come from somewhere. I'm guessing that would reduce the velocity of the plasma and, therefore, the thrust.

[Pariah]

On 5/19/2020 at 7:53 PM, Sociotard said:

A little tourist stop near me has the prototype they made for a nuclear airplane.

 

I've been to EBR-1 where they have the engines on display. 

[Pariah]

On 5/19/2020 at 8:24 PM, Cancer said:

I have not read as much about the Chernobyl disaster as I have about Fukushima, but for some reason in that case the on-site personnel took it upon themselves to perform experiments that were at best badly conceived with that reactor with its positive void coefficient.  

 

There's a documentary called "Zero Hour - Disaster at Chernobyl" that I have my students watch every year. It does a pretty good job of explaining why the incident with Reactor #4 was a cluster**** on multiple levels.

 

tl;dw version: Poor initial design, built on the cheap, bureaucratic interference, safety regulations ignored or overridden for political reasons.