DIY Nuclear Reactors After the End

[DAT]

If you have an available supply of heavy water, or a way to produce it (which we have been doing since the 1930s), you could make a variation of a CANDU power reactor, which uses natural uranium (no enrichment required). The down side is you need to feed it new fuel more often, but the right design will allow you to refuel while operating. Which if your operators use heavy shielded transfer containers for the used fuel (which are used now), isn't a death sentence for your workers.

Lowering the power density of the core for the design, will also lower the efficiency, but remove most of the "meltdown" accidents.

[doctorevilbrain]

What about scavenged nuclear Fusion reactors?

[mlangsdorf]

Self-sustaining nuclear fusion reactors don't exist, so it's hard to say what a scavenged fusion reactor would require. Currently, you need a huge power budget provided by some other process to force the hydrogen to start fusing, and the power you get back isn't as much as you put in - hence not self-sustaining.

Even assuming that some pre-End society got a fusion reactor that was self-sustaining, it probably requires a fairly large power plant to start the fusion plant. That might be tricky to arrange After the End.

Though there are some extremely dubious cold fusion theories that a GM could declare are actually correct, in which case a small fusion reactor might be the kind of thing you could move on the back of a pickup truck. Possibly not a hugely powerful small fusion reactor, but small AtE communities would probably be happy to have something that lets every household run an LED light and a mini-fridge and doesn't require any fuel more complicated than distilled water.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by doctorevilbrain

What about scavenged nuclear Fusion reactors?

<shrug>Design a working fusion reactor first. As a hint don't pick a giant tokamak design. Setting aside the issue of whether or not those are practical as commercial power generators you'd still need to have a functioning industrial state to build or re-build something that large and probably to keep an old one running.

You'd need to go to UT and look at0 a TL10+ (and probably TL10^+) semi-portable design.

[acrosome]

I have to agree that the prospect of a community re-commissioning a hydroelectric power plant is many, many orders of magnitude more likely than scratch-building any sort of nuclear reactor. But on the other hand this is AtE we're talking about, so make up anything that you like.

How about a community that found a surviving RTG? Would that suit your needs? The big problem is that all of the terrestrial examples that I know of have outputs measured at most in double-digit watts- not even kilowatts. Some of the ones for spacecraft broke into three digits, though, and one Soviet satellite RTG made 3kW.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by acrosome

Some of the ones for spacecraft broke into three digits, though, and one Soviet satellite RTG made 3kW.

Are you sure that was an RTG? The Soviets flew genuine small reactors on some satellites, notably their radar ocean reconnaissance family, which needed a lot of power.

[cptbutton]

Originally Posted by acrosome

I have to agree that the prospect of a community re-commissioning a hydroelectric power plant is many, many orders of magnitude more likely than scratch-building any sort of nuclear reactor. But on the other hand this is AtE we're talking about, so make up anything that you like.

How about a community that found a surviving RTG? Would that suit your needs? The big problem is that all of the terrestrial examples that I know of have outputs measured at most in double-digit watts- not even kilowatts. Some of the ones for spacecraft broke into three digits, though, and one Soviet satellite RTG made 3kW.

One problem with RTGs is that depending on the half-life of the isotope used, the higher the power, the shorter the usable lifespan.

[acrosome]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Are you sure that was an RTG? The Soviets flew genuine small reactors on some satellites, notably their radar ocean reconnaissance family, which needed a lot of power.

It was the BES-5, which when I look it up does seem to have been a fast reactor, despite being listed with RTGs in several sources. Nice catch.