Pre-cutting the ground above explosive

[trevor borocz johnson]

57 minutes ago, DarkHunter said:

Using that to produce just the first stage of a fusion bomb it would take between 508,480 and 635,600 kWh. 

So with a fission primary you could set off multiple stages of fusion, ranging into the gigatons, which would be trillions of kwh. 10% efficiency times trillions of kwh is 100,000,000,000. one hundred billion. kwh's. in electricty, that's almost a million times the return on what it took to refine the fissable material.

I'm just saying that doesn't sound like a lot of energy compared to what you get back. How many kilotons would you get from that much fission fuel? Do you know?

[Timothy]

On 05/11/2017 at 4:53 AM, trevor borocz johnson said:

...

As far as I can tell your just making it up or basing it on something you've loosely heard before. 

...

This really sums up pretty much everything you’ve ever posted on UM.

And I’m being dead serious.

[sepulchrave]

10 hours ago, trevor borocz johnson said:

I don't see how this makes the four fundamental energy conversions of explosives, Weight displacement, heat, sound and seismic any different. Are you trying to say that the surface crater I made with a firework would have been different if it was nuclear?

I am saying that there are additional energy conversions (radiation, transmutation, ionization, etc.) in a nuclear explosion that create problems for power generation.

Case in point: If you are using nuclear explosions for water displacement then a 1000 m³ or so of water near the explosion will no longer be water after the explosion. It will be free ions blasted outwards. This has two detrimental effects: First, it reduces the amount of water weight available for displacement, second the ions can aggressively react with the metal chamber walls forming deep pockets of rust or other strains.

In fusion power, the key word is ``confinement'': In both magnetic confinement (tokamaks) and inertial confinement (lasers and pellets) the major problem is protecting everything from the fusion-plasma formed after ignition. Whatever part of your machine touches this plasma will no longer be part of your machine afterwards.

11 hours ago, trevor borocz johnson said:

You say that in BOLD figures when you've admitted one, you don't know how efficient this system is, and two you don't know how much energy input there truly is? Why should I believe anything you say?

I thoroughly explained how 20x is not more then 8x in this situation! Maybe you can support your gravity waves with maths but you sure can't spot your own mistakes if  have to explain why again.

are you serious? I would say word salad but then I would succumb to the cable forum that worships sepulchrave and his gravity waves.

120 kg of raw uranium ore (naturally at 0.7% enrichment) will produce 20 kg of nuclear fuel (at 4.2% enrichment) or 1 kg of warhead (at 84% enrichment).

Using the numbers you provided before, say it takes 50 W to produce 1 kg of nuclear fuel and you get 5000 W back, and say it takes 1000 W to produce 1 kg of warhead, and you get 40 000 W back.

Over all the fuel rod method requires 1000 W input and gives you 100 000 W output, the warhead method takes 1000 W input and gives you 40 000 W output.

 

[trevor borocz johnson]

4 hours ago, sepulchrave said:

In fusion power, the key word is ``confinement'': In both magnetic confinement (tokamaks) and inertial confinement (lasers and pellets) the major problem is protecting everything from the fusion-plasma formed after ignition. Whatever part of your machine touches this plasma will no longer be part of your machine afterwards.

I'm not exactly sure how to put this in words, but the region of vaporization from the nuke when set off in the pool of water, is well below the size of the pool as a whole, the explosive is sized appropriatley to the size of the pool so that there is no damage to the walls.

 

4 hours ago, sepulchrave said:

I am saying that there are additional energy conversions (radiation, transmutation, ionization, etc.) in a nuclear explosion that create problems for power generation.

I doubt any of these things will have to do with the explosives efficiency of energy conversions as a rapidly expanding region of high pressure. 

 

4 hours ago, sepulchrave said:

120 kg of raw uranium ore (naturally at 0.7% enrichment) will produce 20 kg of nuclear fuel (at 4.2% enrichment) or 1 kg of warhead (at 84% enrichment).

Using the numbers you provided before, say it takes 50 W to produce 1 kg of nuclear fuel and you get 5000 W back, and say it takes 1000 W to produce 1 kg of warhead, and you get 40 000 W back.

Over all the fuel rod method requires 1000 W input and gives you 100 000 W output, the warhead method takes 1000 W input and gives you 40 000 W output.

With all your influence at your school and with your government why don't you find out the real numbers on the efficiency's as well as the energy input/output for the explosive instead of just guessing. Since you don't want to believe a  thing I say.

[trevor borocz johnson]

15 hours ago, DarkHunter said:

Using that to produce just the first stage of a fusion bomb it would take between 508,480 and 635,600 kWh.

The 50 Mt three stage Tsar Bomba (King of Bombs) tested by the Soviet Union on 30 October 1961 was the largest and cleanest bomb ever tested, with 97% of its yield coming from fusion (fission yield approximately 1.5 Mt). 1.5 Mt is 1,743,333,000 or 1.7 billion kwh from the fission primary alone. I don't have to be that smart to see that's considerably more of a return then was put into it in the first place.

[sepulchrave]

11 hours ago, trevor borocz johnson said:

I'm not exactly sure how to put this in words, but the region of vaporization from the nuke when set off in the pool of water, is well below the size of the pool as a whole, the explosive is sized appropriatley to the size of the pool so that there is no damage to the walls.

How do you assess the size of the pool required to prevent damage to the walls?

11 hours ago, trevor borocz johnson said:

I doubt any of these things will have to do with the explosives efficiency of energy conversions as a rapidly expanding region of high pressure.

True, they don't really effect the energy of the high pressure wave.

They do, however, offer different avenues for failure of the containment vessel. You may be able to build a chamber that can survive the pressure shock from the bomb, but no material on earth can completely avoid transmuted elements, and I don't think there is any strong and shock-resistant material that can resist corrosion by highly ionized oxygen.

This influences how many times you can use the chamber without risking catastrophic failure.

11 hours ago, trevor borocz johnson said:

With all your influence at your school and with your government why don't you find out the real numbers on the efficiency's as well as the energy input/output for the explosive instead of just guessing. Since you don't want to believe a  thing I say.

Sorry, but I'm not doing that. It is generally a bad idea to use one's scientific credentials to try to obtain classified information about nuclear bombs because ``someone on the internet wants to know''.

Especially since I am not a citizen of the country where I am currently employed, and I really don't want to be executed as a spy.

[trevor borocz johnson]

according to this website http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/12/23/kilotons-per-kilogram/   the yield of kilotons to kg of uranium is generally between .1 and 6. My math based on Darkhunters post would indicate that you would get between 12 and 720 times the return on energy from detonation then you would have used to refine the fissable material. 

 

Seems like if I can get 10% conversion to electricity that the weight displacement system could be making a 7200% profit on the refining of the uranium. Any arguments? 

[trevor borocz johnson]

On 8/28/2017 at 9:32 AM, sepulchrave said:

the total energy of the thermonuclear blast is less than the energy required to construct a thermonuclear bomb,

The estimate's from Dark Hunter and i show that detonation would get an increase of 10 to 720 times the energy used to refine the uranium. What are your sources for a statement like the one you made up top? Seriously.

[sepulchrave]

I admit in light of the link you provide above and Darkhunter's earlier post your method seems more feasible.

18 hours ago, trevor borocz johnson said:

according to this website http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/12/23/kilotons-per-kilogram/   the yield of kilotons to kg of uranium is generally between .1 and 6. My math based on Darkhunters post would indicate that you would get between 12 and 720 times the return on energy from detonation then you would have used to refine the fissable material. 

 

Seems like if I can get 10% conversion to electricity that the weight displacement system could be making a 7200% profit on the refining of the uranium. Any arguments? 

By my calculations, if you have 6 kt/kg yield output, with 227 SWU/kg product input seems like a return on investment of a factor of 614.

It does appear I was wrong in asserting that the energy out from a bomb is less than the energy input.

Conventional fuel rods give a return on investment of a factor of 105, so you need to get at least 17% conversion to electricity to beat a conventional reactor. This does seem an achievable goal.

I still have deep reservations about how you are going to make a chamber that can reliably and repeatedly contain a nuclear or thermonuclear blast, but I admit from an energy-budget perspective your method may work.

 

 

[trevor borocz johnson]

Deuterium is twice as heavy as hydrogen-1, a fact that is very noticeable in the elemental state. Deuterium oxide, D2O, is commonly called "heavy water". Reactor grade heavy water costs about $500/kg. Lithium-deuteride (LiD), the most common and usable fusion fuel, yields 50 kilotons for every kilogram that undergoes fusion. Thats 58 million killowatts in return on 500 dollars. Thats 11,600 times the return on the initial energy investment.Of course a high percentage of the fuel doesn't undergo any fusion and you would have wasted fuel. In Sept. 1997 ORNL was offering Li-6 of 95-96% purity for sale at $1.30 per gram. High purity (>99%) Li-7, which is not the normal byproduct of Li-6 enrichment, was offered for $6.70 per gram.

http://www.maznets.com/nuke/Nfaq6.html

 

[bmk1245]

19 hours ago, sepulchrave said:

[...]

I still have deep reservations about how you are going to make a chamber that can reliably and repeatedly contain a nuclear or thermonuclear blast, but I admit from an energy-budget perspective your method may work.

 

 

It would be as feasible as Verne's columbiad for space travels.

[bmk1245]

12 hours ago, trevor borocz johnson said:

Deuterium is twice as heavy as hydrogen-1, a fact that is very noticeable in the elemental state. Deuterium oxide, D2O, is commonly called "heavy water". Reactor grade heavy water costs about $500/kg. Lithium-deuteride (LiD), the most common and usable fusion fuel, yields 50 kilotons for every kilogram that undergoes fusion. Thats 58 million killowatts in return on 500 dollars. Thats 11,600 times the return on the initial energy investment.Of course a high percentage of the fuel doesn't undergo any fusion and you would have wasted fuel. In Sept. 1997 ORNL was offering Li-6 of 95-96% purity for sale at $1.30 per gram. High purity (>99%) Li-7, which is not the normal byproduct of Li-6 enrichment, was offered for $6.70 per gram.

http://www.maznets.com/nuke/Nfaq6.html

 

Again, energy going into the fusion blast would be ~20% of total yield, so you must divide all your estimations by 5.

[trevor borocz johnson]

On 11/8/2017 at 9:50 AM, sepulchrave said:

I still have deep reservations about how you are going to make a chamber that can reliably and repeatedly contain a nuclear or thermonuclear blast,

After many uses of the same can in my experiment the side did crack in one of the cans. Thickness of the steel walls will range up in ratio to the two different sized explosives. Steel is the most elastic substance there is. Water being one of the most highly energy absorbent substances, the steel does a great job of reflecting a lot of the blast energy back into the water, even afterwords in the form of heat.

Edited November 10, 2017 by trevor borocz johnson

[DarkHunter]

19 hours ago, bmk1245 said:

Again, energy going into the fusion blast would be ~20% of total yield, so you must divide all your estimations by 5.

Once everything is considered it's a lot more then just dividing by 5.

First there is energy released from a nuclear detonation, approximately 50% is in the form of blast force, 35% as heat, and 15% as radiation.  Then there is the geometry of the chamber, the blast is moving in a sphere outward from the bomb so not all of it is going to be going in the right direction to be useful, from some quick calculations the amount of blast going in the right direction will be between approximately 16% and 25%.  Then there is frictional losses which would be significant, in combustion engines approximatrly a third of the total energy is lost due to friction of the piston head moving and this idea would almost certainly have higher frictional losses.  Then there is the energy conversion loss which is harder to estimate but would probably be between 90% and 50% based on the conversion efficiency of other energy sources.

When you factor them all together, and these are just the easily noticeable ones, the upper limit on the energy gained would be around 7.5% of the energy released from the bomb with a better upper bound being around 5%.

The largest fusion bomb currently in use by America is the B83 with a yield of 1.2 megatons.  With 7.5% efficiency it would produce 104,600,000 kWh.  A 1000 MW nuclear power plant would create around 7,884,000,000 kWh a year or about 70 times the energy in a far safer, reliable, and at lower cost.  Detonating a fusion weapon the strength of the Czar bomba would only produce around half the energy of the 1000 MW nuclear power plant.

[bmk1245]

8 hours ago, DarkHunter said:

Once everything is considered it's a lot more then just dividing by 5.

[...]

Yes, thats for sure. As I mentioned, fusion (deuterium-tritium fusion reaction) blast constitutes ~20% of total yield, while for fission it goes up to the 50% (like you said). The rest is what you said.

[trevor borocz johnson]

12 hours ago, DarkHunter said:

The largest fusion bomb currently in use by America is the B83 with a yield of 1.2 megatons.  With 7.5% efficiency it would produce 104,600,000 kWh.  A 1000 MW nuclear power plant would create around 7,884,000,000 kWh a year or about 70 times the energy in a far safer, reliable, and at lower cost.  Detonating a fusion weapon the strength of the Czar bomba would only produce around half the energy of the 1000 MW nuclear power plant.

Another benefit of the weight displacement power plant is the energy from one powerful explosive gets stored in the weight like a battery, and can be extracted in accordance with how much is demanded at any given time. A nuclear or coal or dam creates a constant out put of electricity and a lot of it is wasted. 

I also think it would be a challenge from many different points to replace fossil fuels or nuclear with this system. I don't think it would be impossible though.To say it could be done in a year would be impossible.

I m skeptical on where you got your 7.5% from too. How will the blast energy be going in the wrong direction and what does that matter?

[DarkHunter]

1 hour ago, trevor borocz johnson said:

Another benefit of the weight displacement power plant is the energy from one powerful explosive gets stored in the weight like a battery, and can be extracted in accordance with how much is demanded at any given time. A nuclear or coal or dam creates a constant out put of electricity and a lot of it is wasted. 

I also think it would be a challenge from many different points to replace fossil fuels or nuclear with this system. I don't think it would be impossible though.To say it could be done in a year would be impossible.

I m skeptical on where you got your 7.5% from too. How will the blast energy be going in the wrong direction and what does that matter?

First you are just wrong about nuclear, coal, or hydro power wasting energy.  Nuclear and coal are base load providers meaning they provide the energy that the demand never dips below.  All of the energy produced by coal and nuclear power is completely used.  Hydro power is unique in that it can be base or peak load provider but it still doesn't waste any energy, by changing the angle on the fins of the turbines and my changing the amount of water being used hydro power can easily change how much energy it produces and unlike nuclear or coal that often takes days or weeks to change it's energy output levels hydro power can do it extremely quickly, like within minutes quickly, which allows it to be a peak load provider.  Basically energy generation produces only a very tiny amount of wasted energy.

Where I got the 7.5% I explained and the math is easy.  0.5 (percentage of the energy released as blast force) * 0.25 (percent of the blast force moving in the right direction) * 0.66 (this accounts for the third of the energy loss due to friction of the mass moving as this is definitely not frictionless, this number should probably be closer to 0.4) * 0.9 or 0.5 (the energy conversion from having this linear motion turning a generator to produce energy), depending on if you used the 0.9 or 0.5 at the end you would get approximately 7.5% or 5%.  

As for the blast energy going in the wrong direction it's best to explain it by thinking of the chamber as a cube and the fusion bomb as a point inside the cube.  Of this hypothetical cube only 1 face of it will move when a force is applied to it, the rest are fixed in place.  When the bomb detonated it causes a blast force to move outward from the bomb as an expanding sphere.  As this sphere expands it will come into contact with all faces of this cube but only 1 of the 6 faces is able to move while the force hitting the other 5 faces is wasted as they remain stationary.  You could try arguing the blast force would bounce off the sides of the container but that wouldn't help significantly as the collision with the surface would take a lot of the energy, then there is the issue of if it bounces in the right direction, and the problem that the distance it has to travel before hitting the moving surface has increased thus decreasing it's energy.  Ultimately any energy gained from bouncing off the sides would be insignificant.  

As for why it is important, you are wasting a lot of the energy released in the form of the blast force.  If you change the geometry of the chamber from a cube to another shape you can probably get around 25% of the blast energy instead of only approximately 16%.  With a surface of infinite area and ignoring that blast force decreases with the cube of the distance you could get close to 50% of the blast force but that is impossible.  It is important to remember that the total energy released in the form of the blast is evenly distributed across the surface of this expanding sphere.

[trevor borocz johnson]

6 hours ago, DarkHunter said:

Where I got the 7.5% I explained and the math is easy.  0.5 (percentage of the energy released as blast force) * 0.25 (percent of the blast force moving in the right direction) * 0.66 (this accounts for the third of the energy loss due to friction of the mass moving as this is definitely not frictionless, this number should probably be closer to 0.4) * 0.9 or 0.5 (the energy conversion from having this linear motion turning a generator to produce energy), depending on if you used the 0.9 or 0.5 at the end you would get approximately 7.5% or 5%. 

I can't say for sure how the blast behaves in the container. The firework I used sat at the bottom and the can was filled to the top with water. When it exploded the water shot up instantly in a perfectly straight stream ( no spray or splattering) that was about ten to twelve feet high. Afterwards there was smoke in the can and about half the water gone. The blast energy from the explosive is prone to weight displacement if there is a clear non obstructed path for the weight to travel through. I f the explosive is in water to deep or a container to wide for its size, it won't convert the energy to weight to displacement, but a lot more seismic. Thats why experiments to gauge everything are important for this idea. 

 

7 hours ago, DarkHunter said:

All of the energy produced by coal and nuclear power is completely used.

A lot of it escapes as heat in the wires, don't you know that? 

 

7 hours ago, DarkHunter said:

You could try arguing the blast force would bounce off the sides of the container but that wouldn't help significantly as the collision with the surface would take a lot of the energy,

oo thats where your wrong my friend, steel is the most elastic substance on earth, it does a great job at reflecting the energy back into the water which is convientally one of the most energy absorbent substances on earth.

[DarkHunter]

9 minutes ago, trevor borocz johnson said:

I can't say for sure how the blast behaves in the container. The firework I used sat at the bottom and the can was filled to the top with water. When it exploded the water shot up instantly in a perfectly straight stream ( no spray or splattering) that was about ten to twelve feet high. Afterwards there was smoke in the can and about half the water gone. The blast energy from the explosive is prone to weight displacement if there is a clear non obstructed path for the weight to travel through. I f the explosive is in water to deep or a container to wide for its size, it won't convert the energy to weight to displacement, but a lot more seismic. Thats why experiments to gauge everything are important for this idea. 

 

A lot of it escapes as heat in the wires, don't you know that? 

 

oo thats where your wrong my friend, steel is the most elastic substance on earth, it does a great job at reflecting the energy back into the water which is convientally one of the most energy absorbent substances on earth.

Once again a chemical explosion and a nuclear explosion are drastically different and can't be compared to each other and your experiment is not representative at all of a nuclear explosion.

I do know about losses in energy due to resistance in wires, the real question is why you believe your idea wouldn't have this loss also.  The loss of energy due to resistance is always going to be there no matter the source of generation so it's a moot point to bring up.  Honestly it sounds like an attempt to save face after bringing up something you knew nothing about.

Once again you are wrong, steel is no where near the most elastic material on earth.  Graphene has a Young's modulus almost 5 times higher then steel, tungsten is approximately twice that of steel, beryllium is almost 50% more elastic then steel, and there are other more elastic materials then steel.  Secondly no matter the material some percentage of the blast force would be absorbed by the container when it hits it and some will be reflective.  Even if you would somehow reflect 99% of the blast force, which you won't, perfectly in the right direction, which won't always happen, you still have the problem that blast force decreases with the cube of the distance traveled and any rebounding would drastically be increasing the distance.

You do realize adding water to your idea would make it far worse.

[trevor borocz johnson]

6 minutes ago, DarkHunter said:

I do know about losses in energy due to resistance in wires, the real question is why you believe your idea wouldn't have this loss also.  The loss of energy due to resistance is always going to be there no matter the source of generation so it's a moot point to bring up.  Honestly it sounds like an attempt to save face after bringing up something you knew nothing about.

Well the rate at which energy is released from the conveyor in the invention can be changed as the moment demands. If you add more coal and demand suddenly drops you can't just put the coal out.

 

11 minutes ago, DarkHunter said:

Once again you are wrong, steel is no where near the most elastic material on earth.

No its one of the most elastic. elasticity means returning to its original shape and steel is great at that.

13 minutes ago, DarkHunter said:

You do realize adding water to your idea would make it far worse.

HAha! how does the water make the system worse? We haven't even discussed efficiency increases by the heat that it absorbs.

[bmk1245]

My goodness..

Trevor, you are like eight year old who tries to build live sized Saturn V using paper and plastic, and fly to the Moon... "Billy launched model in his backyard, why can't I just scale it up?"

[trevor borocz johnson]

On 11/10/2017 at 9:24 AM, bmk1245 said:

Yes, thats for sure. As I mentioned, fusion (deuterium-tritium fusion reaction) blast constitutes ~20% of total yield, while for fission it goes up to the 50% (like you said). The rest is what you said.

where did you hear that?

[pallidin]

Explosion-to-cyclic energy is not new...

Internal combustion engines use this principle, for example.

Porting the technology to utilize nuclear explosions as the fuel has significant, extremely costly, gross structural/containment/safety/contamination issues.

Is it possible? Of course... Any explosion can be converted into cyclic energy production.

But the infrastructure cost with doing this via nuclear would be astronomical, not to mention replacement of structures due to contamination and weakening.

Thus, to be relevant, one must firmly address the infrastructure cost and the infrastructure's periodic replacement costs.

[trevor borocz johnson]

19 hours ago, pallidin said:

Explosion-to-cyclic energy is not new...

Internal combustion engines use this principle, for example.

Porting the technology to utilize nuclear explosions as the fuel has significant, extremely costly, gross structural/containment/safety/contamination issues.

Is it possible? Of course... Any explosion can be converted into cyclic energy production.

But the infrastructure cost with doing this via nuclear would be astronomical, not to mention replacement of structures due to contamination and weakening.

Thus, to be relevant, one must firmly address the infrastructure cost and the infrastructure's periodic replacement costs.

Are you suggesting building an enormous internal combustion engine? Cause we've been over that one and its differences with the power plant I have described here.

[Parsec]

19 minutes ago, trevor borocz johnson said:

Are you suggesting building an enormous internal combustion engine? Cause we've been over that one and its differences with the power plant I have described here.

No, he's suggesting that your idea is economically inefficient. 

The amount of money and resources you put in is less than what you get.