The 2005 general election is nearly upon us. Which way will you vote, and you reasons why. Here is a brief list of the potential contestants, please add your own.


More tax!
Less tax!
Dont know!
Death to all infidels!
Who gives a shit?

The great pretender.

A labour supporter, but blair is liar, took us to war on a lie. Why doesnt any one care about the iraqi people that could be your brother, sister, mum, daughter, grandfather etc Its not their fault Hussain was in control. My conscience will not allow me to vote for that. The tories would have done the same, so its the liberals for me (though it hurts to vote for them).

Kivver.
Blair dearly wanted a "Maggie", so he lied and put himself in hock to Bush......and has been found out.

No, it was not the Iraqis fault that Soddem was in power. And they lost 100,000
in the second war. But how many had Soddem put down of his own people if not his own brand of Islam? With many more to be killed over the years?

The French did not ask for Boney. Nor the Germans Hitler or the Russians Stalin. It's an endless argument. Should we go and get rid of Mugabe?

Read about the disaster that is Darfur......and it's cause. Should we mount an Expedition? There would not be many takers for that idea, I can assure you.

Sleep well on your dilemma :~)

The MOST Important issue is not being discussed.

That issue is ENERGY!

It is energy that makes people rich.
I am not talking about individuals, I am talking about everybody.

Of course information & education can make 1 person rich but that is mainly due to the shifting of wealth from a group of people to that person.

It is just not possible for everybody on this planet to lead happy & fulfilling lives until we solve the energy problem.

The amount of cheap, easily available energy places an upper limit on the tangible wealth of the people on the planet.

Global warming is going to kill billions of us if we dont hurry up & solve this problem because China & India are likely to exceed the CO2 output of the rest of the world by several hundred percent.

Hydrogen & Helium are SAFE.
Uranium & Plutonium are NOT SAFE.

The solution is NOT the current form of Nuclear Power.
Once again, we are being lied to by the politicians because they want the Nuclear Fission Industry because they want the weapons.

Current Nuclear Power stations use Nuclear FISSION.

Nuclear Fission Power stations are dangerous, they are terrorist targets, they require fascist style security, they produce radioactive waste & they lead to the spread of Nuclear Weapons.

AND Nuclear Fission Power stations do not give us any extra energy!
(See below for the reasons why!)

Fission SPLITS Atoms into smaller ones.
Fusion COMBINES Atoms into bigger ones.

FISSION is NOT a solution!
FUSION is our only hope of Nuclear Power!


Hydrogen & Helium are NOT RADIOACTIVE.
Nuclear FUSION is inherently CLEAN & SAFE.
(See below for the reasons why!)

But its harder to do.

15 years ago, at the Joint European Torus project, at Culham in Oxfordshire, they reached break even point where they got more energy out than they put in.

They needed to build a larger version for their next prototype.
This has not been started!
WHY? Because the USA, Europeans, Japanese & Russians decided to get together & try to save money by having 1 joint project.

Since then, they have been arguing about where it was going to be built & who will get the contracts.

This is the most URGENT issue facing the planet BUT ANOTHER 15 YEARS HAVE BEEN LOST!

With the Manhattan Project when they developed the 1st Atomic Bomb, they didnt care how much it was going to cost & they gave it whatever resources that were asked for because they wanted it as quickly as possible.

Nuclear FUSION requires greater URGENCY!

The energy released by Fusing Light Atoms together is many times greater than that released by splitting Heavy Atoms like Uranium & it doesnt produce such appalling radioactive waste.

Fusion produces clean energy with no radioactive problems, no danger to the public no matter what goes wrong or what crashes into it.

We need to get started with a huge investment into Fusion Energy so that we can abandon oil & coal completely. It may be huge but it is cheaper than the Iraq war.



===============================================

What can Fusion do for us?

Looking back at history, Democracy has a habit of growing & spreading but is limited by a ceiling that rises as our technical ability to access energy grows.

Democracy increases & decreases from time to time but it cant go above that limit.

You cant have Democracy without Energy.
Without fossil fuels, we would be working on the land just to grow enough food to stay alive. That kind of society can support only a few people who dont work on the land so the rest of us would be under the foot of a handful of barons & their thugs.

Competition for energy/wealth causes war not democracy.

Do the Fusion thing & there will be so much available energy that there will be no competition for it & it will be clean, safe energy.

Renewable energy will only be enough to buy us some time until Fusion is developed. It is not enough to take everybody out of poverty.

Energy is Wealth.



******************************************************

How is it that Fusion can be CLEAN?

When Deuterium & Helium3 are fused together, the result is ordinary Helium4 (a very useful gas) & a proton which is Hydrogen1 & is also rocket fuel.

There is nothing radioactive & the energy is carried off by the kinetic energy of the Helium & Hydrogen nuclei which are steerable because they are charged particles & can therefore be deflected by electric & magnetic fields.

A movement of charge is an electric current so we go straight to electricity
WITHOUT the wasteful intermediate steps of boilng water & running a steam turbine to turn a generator & losing 60% of the energy.

All we have to do is pass the fast moving nuclei down a particle accelerator in reverse to produce an alternating current to get the electrical energy into a more usable form.

Only around 2% of the energy would be lost in this process & the amount of energy produced for a small amount of fuel is staggeringly large.

When the waste Hydrogen is burnt, it produces Water but it is much more efficient to put it in a fuel cell & produce even more electricity.

Fuel cells can also be used to run electric cars.


**********************************************************
Why Nuclear Fission Power stations are no good.

It takes the output of 5 power stations to supply the energy that goes into the building of 1 Nuclear Fission Power station.

That figure comes from the Open University.

It takes about 7 years to build a Nuclear Fission Power station.
SO
It takes about 35 years to get back the energy that you put into building it.
BUT
They only last about 35 years.
SO
Nuclear Fission Power stations do not give us any extra energy!

The older they get, the more chance of an accident.

BUT Its WORSE than that because it takes a large amount of energy to run them & maintain them & fix them & they dont run all the time.

It also takes a large amount of energy
to mine & process the fuel,
to deal with the waste,
to store the waste & look after it for thousands of years.
to decommission them & deal with the radioactive rubble, metal & other junk at the end of their life.

So you cant win with Nuclear Fission Power stations.

This is of course explicitly demonstrated by the fact that British Energy keeps going bust.

British Energy didnt have to pay for:
The building of the current ones.
The building of the fuel processing facilities.
The building of the waste processing facilities.
The fuel & waste transportation facilities.
The security systems.
The repeatedly aborted building of the waste disposal facilities.
(Do you want the waste in your back yard?)

The government keeps on handing over more & more of our taxes to bail it out.
It still keeps going bust.

The government hands over another half Billion & another half Billion & another half Billion & so it goes on.

Even with all that, British Energy still cant make a profit.
This shows that Nuclear Fission cannot give us the energy we want, all we can do is dangerously try to get back some of the energy that went into building these things.

We must develop Fusion.

apple.

If it was as easy to control fusion, i'm sure someone would be knocking out takeaway fusion power stations next week. It's not that simple, at the moment there is no known way of controlling fusion reactions outside dial a yield. It's very crude, you cant simply turn it on and off. Fission at least can be damped down to control the reaction, not quite so esy with fusion. Also there are problems with containment, there is no none way to control fusion once set in motion.


Or at least thats what i believe...I am ready to be persuaded otherwise.

BTW. Thers something fishy going on with the polls, there would appear to be lots of tactical voting which is making the news seem wrong.


Any ideas?

Maxk
How ya doin?
Is apple lardy by any chance? He's got the same complaint.
Cheers.

MaxK,

Fusion is very easy to turn off, the problem is to keep it going.

Like I said an enormous investment is required, on the scale of the project to produce the 1st atom bomb but the participants have been arguing for the last 15 years about where the next experimental reactor should be built & who is going to get the contracts.

standber, I have accused you of something, click here to find out what

Will your response be predictable or will you just say nothing?

apple - Sorry chief, but a few mistakes in your argument.

The argument about needing 5 power stations to build one nuclear station is a load of tosh (not suprising if it was sourced by the open university). You could equally argue that it takes the energy from 3 power stations to make one hospital, or two for a school, etc. Should we not make hospitals?

"Fission is not dangerous". Sorry, but you are incorrect here. Firstly, the proton is a highly energetic particle that can cause massive destruction when absorbed by a medium. The helium atom stripped of its electrons is in fact the radiocative alpha particle. A fission reaction needs to be undertaken at extremely high temperatures and pressure - effectively in a plasma state. If the containment vessel were to break or leak, an uncontrolled plasma leak would burn through everything in its path. So a fission reactor is also likeley to be a terrorist target.

I could go on, but this realy isn't the place for a lecture on nuclear physics. Still, nice to see that someone has a considered view on the matter. LOL

StarFrog,

You are wrong!

Proton beams are no more risky than electricity, you just need to stay out of their way. They can cause damage & so can electricity.

They do not contaminate anything.

Proton beams & other plasma beams are used in industry already.

Plasma leaks have taken place at the reactor at Culham, they dont even rate a mention on TV news because people dont stand near the reactor when it is operating & the damaged equipment is just replaced so that they can continue with experiments.


Fission is dangerous because of unavoidable contamination & waste & bomb making.

Fusion with Deuterium & Helium3 does not cause any contamination or waste & can't be stolen to make an atom bomb.

Other forms of Fusion cause minor contamination of the reactor walls.

If you bomb a Fusion reactor, you will destroy the building, there is not enough energy in the reactor to do anything else & there would be no contamination of large areas of the country.

All the factories to produce all the parts & materials over the building period of a the current form of Nuclear Station have to be included in the energy calculations for building one.

Steel & cement are just 2 examples of the enormous energy hungry ingredients involved.



The government keeps on handing over more & more of our taxes to bail out British Energy which runs the current Fission Power Stations.
It still keeps going bust.

The government hands over another half Billion & another half Billion & another half Billion & so it goes on.

Even with all that, British Energy still cant make a profit.
This shows that Nuclear Fission cannot give us the energy we want, all we can do is dangerously try to get back some of the energy that went into building these things.

We must develop Fusion.

apple - Perhaps I should have started by stating that I am all in favour of nuclear fusion. I agree that it is the cleaner technology of the two nuclear powers. But (without the risk of being too pedantic) I felt that I had to correct some of your post.

For a start, the fusion reaction that you have been talking about is NOT the reaction commonly used in attempting fusion. The most attempted reaction is to fuse deuterium with tritium to form helium-4 and a NEUTRON - not a proton.

Now a neutron has no electrical charge, but is emitted from the reaction with considerable energy and considerable momentum which can be delivered to anything in its path. Indeed, this is the basis of the neutron bomb.

The neutron bomb is a small hydrogen bomb. The neutron bomb differs from standard nuclear weapons insofar as its primary lethal effects come from the radiation damage caused by the neutrons it emits. It is also known as an enhanced-radiation weapon (ERW).

The augmented radiation effects mean that blast and heat effects are reduced so that physical structures including houses and industrial installations, are less affected. Because neutron radiation effects drop off very rapidly with distance, there is a sharper distinction between areas of high lethality and areas with minimal radiation doses.

This was desired by the forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization since they have to be prepared to fight in densely populated areas; any tactical nuclear explosion will endanger civilian lives and property.

The fusion neutron bomb is more destructive than the atomic fission bomb.

Protons can contaminate. Protons are used in linear acclerators to produce more exotic nuclear particles. Put simply, they have the power to change the structure of matter. In human terms, this can mean mutation.

Arguments about power requirements to provide the steel and cement to build a reactor are the same for building a hospital. So that's not really a valid point, is it.

Oh, and British Energy are also involved in the UK's fusion program.

By the way, my background is nuclear physics.

LOL

Starfrog,

Yes, any high speed particles can cause mutation but why would you be standing in their way?

Charged particles are stopped by air, plasma beams in industry HAVE TO be operated in a vacuum.

You can burn through concrete with a plasma beam but only if you place it right up close.

There is no way a plasma leak from a fusion reactor would have enough energy to get out of the building.

Yes, the most commonly attempted experimental reaction of projects in the 80s was to fuse deuterium with tritium. But at Culham most of the experiments up to 1990 were with Deuterium only because there is a minor amount of radioactivity from Tritium & the Neutrons from the reaction do cause minor of contamination of the reactor walls. PLUS a higher temperature is required.

I already said that other forms of Fusion cause minor contamination of the reactor walls.

The form that I mainly spoke about goes straight to electricity & does not lose energy in steam turbines & generators.

Deuterium & Helium3 require an even higher temp but the good thing is that containment is slightly easier because only charged particles are involved.

There is no way that protons from a fusion reactor can contaminate because light element fusion only requires energies in the 15 to 250 KeV range depending on the type of Fusion.
Whereas particle accelerators require energies in the many MeV to many GeV range & upwards to produce exotic particles.

The fusion reaction time for the D-He3 reaction becomes significant at a temperature of about 10 KeV, and peaks about about 200 KeV. So a 100 KeV (or so) reactor looks about optimum.

Having or stealing hydrogen won't help terrorists make a fusion bomb because you can't make a fusion bomb without a fission bomb as a trigger but you should know that already.

You say that your background is nuclear physics.

Well SO IS MINE!

You say that you are in favour of Fusion so lets hear you campaign for it instead of raising red herrings like the neutron bomb.

Oh dear.


The boffins are reaching for thier nuclear handbags.......:-)


However, a straight question which one of you boffins might be able to answer.

Instead of the huge nuc power stations that we have at the moment, why not have smaller easier to maintain (i imagine) nuc reactors? I am thinking along the lines of nuc sub reactors. They appear to be very powerfull for their size. The yanks sub reactors appear to be very safe too, not needing powerfull pumps to cool/control the reactors.....just a thought.


Fusion seems a long way off, even if the pols could get thier heads together. Whereas, energy is needed now.

apple

I do apoligise for getting you so wound up. I am not raising red herrings (as you put it). But then again, what is the purpose of your posting a short essay on nuclear power when there is no apparent relevance to this with regard to the election? If no parties have brought it up in their manifestos, why bother to mention it?

If your background is nuclear physics then why do you say the following.

You state: "Charged particles are stopped by air" - where on earth do you get that idea from? Yes, some are. Alpha particles will be stopped in about 8cm of air. But if all charged particles were stopped by air then presumably no ionized particles from space would enter our atmosphere (those poor physicists trying to detect neutrinos 1000's of meters below ground ought to give up)? And what about lightning? Beta and gamma radiation? The list goes on.

You said: "You can burn through concrete with a plasma beam but only if you place it right up close." I suggest you take a look at some industrial processes that use electroplasma etching/cutting. And lasers, for that matter, can cut through concrete and steel from quite some distance.

EDIT: "Plasma beams HAVE to work in a vacuum"- Nonsense. Again, look at industrial processes involving plasma etching. You don't keep putting the workpiece in a vacuum chamber. Arc-welding, for example, is a form of plasma beam. How many welders have to enter a vacuum chamber to work?

Research at Culham: I will bow to your knoledge that earlier reserch involved fusing deuterium with helium3, but from 1997 until the end of the JET project the research has involved attempting to fuse deuterium with tritium. In fact, nearly all new fusion projects are pursuing this route. Now why do you think they changed? May I be so humble to suggest that the deuterium-helium3 method was unpracticable. So if we were to have commercial fusion reactors it is apparent that they would use the deuterium-tritium reaction with the associated release of high energy neutrons.

Don't get me wrong, apple. I'm not trying to knock fusion as a viable energy source. I agree with you that it is inherently safer than fision. I believe though that we are unlikely to see fusion reactors in this country for quite some time - not until the public are made more aware of the science. Therefore it is always important that any information we disseminate is factualy correct.


MaxK - small nuclear plants would seem a good suggestion, but has always been thwarted by the NIMBY argument.

MaxK,

You suggest having mini Fission reactors.
ie. With Uranium235 or Plutonium.

The problems that I have already talked about dont get better with small ones, they get worse.

I suppose you want to have large numbers of small ones to make up for the fact that they are small

Apart from anything else:

What a wonderful choice of targets you are providing for terrorists to contaminate areas the size of cities by bombing the reactors or flying planes into them.

A large increase in the number of targets for them.

You would also give them thousands more places to steal radioactive material from to make an Atomic Bomb or a Contamination Bomb.

Fusion does not have this problem.

You said, Energy is needed now.
Im glad to see that you recognise that the energy problem is urgent.

There is NOTHING ELSE that is MORE URGENT.

Starfrog,

Im sorry if you felt my comments about what you said were a little too strong but I had just discovered that my car battery had failed so I was feeling a bit impatient & disgruntled.

Why did I raise this issue?

As I said when I first mentioned this, the MOST Important issue is not being discussed.

The Energy issue is more important than ANYTHING else.

The other reason is that Ive got cancer & it gives me a new perspective on life. It makes me want to speak out. After all, Ive got nothing to lose by doing so. Looking back over the years, I should have spoken out on a lot of things but didnt.


Re your last message. There you go again!

I shouldnt have to explain these things to YOU, with your background!
I cant believe that your physics & applied physics knowledge is that rusty.

Perhaps you are just winding me up with all the deliberately incorrect things & red herrings that you raise.

I think that you have abandoned logic in favour of entertainment.

You ARE just trying to wind me up.

apple.


With all due respect, I dont think you are looking at this energy/nuc problem with a clear mindset.

You are still in the "huge facility" school of nuclear engineering.

I am talking about small reactors that can be easily guarded, they dont need to be above ground for that matter. The nucs used for subs are not huge, they do not present a large target, they could even be buried...some target eh?...but they would certainly require guarding, but that cost is pennies compared with the power output.

The security issue is not an issue at all, just put someone who is competant in charge. Take my word for it.


BTW, I am sorry you are not well.

All over now-not the result I wanted but we'll do better next time! There's a big black cloud looming-take cover everyone. I have really enjoyed the discussions all. cheers MP

Not the result I wanted either, funny fact is the Tories polled more votes overall than labour, yet we did not get the sort of seats we should have .
Have labour learned something from mugabe, along the lines of you might not want us but whatever we can do to make you have us.

Dont bank on pr anytime soon, but perhaps the tories will look at it in a different light now.