Comment on Crazy Ideas Thread

Sat, 11 Jul 2015 22:39:39 GMT

This is actually a topic I'm fairly well-read on.

The basic problem is that hydrogen bombs are powerful. To make this idea economically competitive, you need very large bombs, as smaller bombs derive a proportionally higher amount of their energy from fission, and fission fuel (especially the high-quality fission fuel needed for a warhead) is very expensive. The problem, of course, is that with such powerful bombs (hundreds of kt range), there's just no way to safely confine the effect of the shock waves AND produce useful power at the same time.

So project PACER (as SIlentCal linked) was designed to use smaller, more-containable weapons. But here you have the problem that since the bombs are small, they're mostly fission, and the produced power winds up being about 3x more expensive than a conventional nuclear power plant.

Unless someone figures out a way to make a small all-fusion bomb, this idea is never going to be feasible.

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