About this user
Engineer, Writer, Gamer, Ex-Army, Martial Artist, Historian, Anthropologist, Physicist, and Astrophysicist...what can I say? While you guys were watching Saturday morning cartoons, I was watching Nova and reading Darwin :)
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ON RADIOSPECTRUM SHIFT ISOTOPE POWER GENERATION
This is a concept I have been working on for 20 years now: how to solve the problems of world-wide power needs and nuclear waste disposal. It took from the time I was in grade school until now for all the pieces of the technology to FINALLY reach fruition, but the last piece was FINALLY developed a few months back...
I always believed the solution to one was the solution to the other, especially when I found out that most of the lifetime energy output of nuclear waste is STILL resident in the material AFTER it has been classified as waste! You see, nuclear waste is "waste" because it contains too low a density of uranium isotopes to be fissionable in a chain reaction, most of its uranium isotopes having already undergone fission and been reduced to much smaller (and thus harder to split) isotopes of random elements.
But these NEW isotopes are STILL radioactive, a term which means "broadcasts radio waves" by the way. The term has come to ALSO refer to any sort of material that naturally broadcasts electromagnetic or particulate energy when in its natural state... Yeah, thats right, I said "ENERGY"!
The problem has always been how to HARNESS this energy safely and reliably. The most basic system for doing so is to suspend a radio-reception antenna in proximity to to the material, but this only pick up and converts a FRACTION of the radio wave energy the material puts out, which itself is a FRACTION of its broadcast energy spectrum, and eventually causes the antenna to become brittle and less efficient as it absorbs stray broadcast neutrons and positrons.
But, did you know that there are several compounds, most of them alloys or suspensions of aluminum, that are not only IMMUNE to the absorption effect, but ALSO cause spectrum shift in broadcast energy output? Mostly towards the radio wave spectrum, which aluminum naturally interacts with (this is why most radio wave antennae are aluminum, fyi)? Or that water in ANY state is a natural absorber of both positrons AND neutrons (that is why it is such a good radiation shield)?
So now we have our basic concept: a system that uses alloyed aluminum shielding to convert emitted EM radiation into a narrow band of easily manageable radio frequency, and is itself surrounded in water so as to absorb emitted radiation (incidentally creating Deuterium, a fusion material, for free....nice).
But we are still left with the problems of what to do with the HEAT generated by that water-absorption process, AND the radio waves themselves. Radio waves are difficult things to manage, being converted easily into randomized heat by dense materials, and passing through most materials with almost no strength loss in any case. That is why they are used in so many methods of broadcast transmission, such as your cell phone.
Enter the LAST two pieces of technology: RFID tags and EM Shield Ceramics.
RFID tags, in addition to being an Orwellian's wet dream, are ALSO a microscopic radio antenna that picks up frequencies in a wide band, uses them to generate power, and then retransmits on a DIFFERENT band using that power. But for OUR purposes, we just want the hair-like pick-up component and the attached positive and negative voltage poles.
An offshoot of research into radiation she idling for space travel was the discovery of a family of ceramic compounds that reflects broad portions of EM energy easily. These ceramics quickly found their way into low-radiation civilian uses, such as medical scanner shielding and low-EM flat screen technology.
Finally, we have thermocouple power generation. For this system to work you need a thermocouple that is elastic with a high tensile strength, non-oxidizable, and capable of retaining its properties at temps varying from 10 to 2000 degrees Fahrenheit (for safety reasons). Type N (Nicrosil/Nisil) is perfect for the job.
"So how do you put it all together?" Glad you asked, here is step-by-step:
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