Home heat source from old nuke rods .

 Ok . consider this one as thinking thru the real implications .

It's widely stated in fantasy lit of the past that we'd all have nuke
heated houses . My personal comment is that solar power is merely
using a fusion plant 93 million or so miles away . N.I.M.B.Y indeed .

Let's look at a closer to home nuke .

The mundane heat pump is part A of the proposal here .

Part B is a mass of vitrified "spent" fuel designed to produce stable
long term heat . Reading the various proposals describing vitrified
radwastes as " Glassy masses that would be inert other than being
radioactive and thermally emissive  "  So thus a concrete block
housing a suitable amount of such vitrified Radioactives should at
it's surface emit only heat and radiations . Such radiations being
stoppable by X feet of dirt etc . DO please question these postulates.

I have extracted my postulates in Part B largely from the
 " common wisdom"  on these subjects .

So the completed install would be a concrete encased heat source
used as thermal input and a mundane off the shelf heat pump .

Comments of a constructive or humor provoking fashion welcome .
Comments upon my sanity are redundant .
Flames etc please direct to /dev/null

Oren Beck

www.campdownunder.com

" My swimming pool is heated by a fusion reactor , it's 93 million
miles away , a generally accepted as safe distance for such .
It's called the sun, it shines on the pool which gets warm by the end
of August or so . "

 
How do you control who gets this stuff, and how do you prevent it
from being misused by a motivated miscreant?


Well, "stoppable" is of course not really the case, the radiation will
drop off gradually as you add more dirt, but never be completely
stopped.  How much dirt is enough?  I dunno, how much radiation are
we talking about?


Hm.  Well, it's waste heat, and it's available, but look at it this
way.  The general public is only barely competant to have something
like gasoline in their control - look at all of the Darwin awards winners
or entrants who do stupid things with a relatively low-density fuel.
Now, extrapolate that same human stupidity to a fuel source with known
handling concerns, and I can't see it going well.  Hell, the product
liability lawyers alone would shut you down before you could start.


I could see this sort of a fuel source being used as a "secondary,
non-fission nuclear energy plant", on a scale of "It's just another
power source, except that there's no pollution".  Not so much as a
"Call now to order your Nuke-O-Matic - call within the next 30 minutes
and get, free, this set of lead-lined boxer shorts" kind of thing.

How much heat would you get from this stuff, I wonder?  Would there be
enough to generate steam, or would you have to go with a heat exchanger
setup?  I'm thinking the latter...

Dave Hinz

 

Control is by the economics inherent in purchasing enough of these
units . Then processing out enough fissile or contaminating grade to
be even remotely credible as a threat source . That is likely enough .
Considering the legions of more credible threat components ? Comments?


And those numbers are in the realm of where real design math folks
truly earn their pay . By the criteria of a "zero avoidable" rad dose
much of the bulding materials fail that test . Radon issue aside ,
houses often have overlooked background emissions arguably greater
than this concept might produce if done right . Your camping lantern
mantle for one . That old color tv . Ceramic tile . Luddites armed
with out of context facts have strangled many viable choices in life .


Liability insurance is a human fiction . This is a tech exercise . The
economic fiction of threat dilution rendering these power sources safe
as mother's milk still holds true . As one CAN kill someone by
drowning them in mother's milk . Silly though that would be ...
Worry more about poorly installed lead acid batteries or poorly stored
conventional fuels being hoarded against price gouging events .


See the Larry Niven bit about a radioactive currency causing lead
lined wallet pockets and radiation sick pickpockets :>


Well - Thats the next design iteration . Coupling the heat while
shielding the radiation is a non trivial design element .
My sketch in the shaving mirror fog was buried concrete heat bricks X
feet below the pipes of a trench type geothermal system . So even if
only short term heat supply of X years then steady decrease occurs
fails safe to ground source of conventional geosource .

Anyone here having experience with Delta T/ Electricity used for heat
pumps calculations able to comment on required temps for this to be
feasible ?

Do recall that these vitrified wastes are alleged by the proponents of
that tech to be chemically inert and non dissolvable . Extraction
methods I can think of would be probally harder than simply stealing a
bomb or contaminant grade isotopes from more concentrated sources .

 So burying them in ground actually decreases threat concentration by
dispersal !

Thanks for the constructive feedback Dave ! You  have given me some
valid points to dig at .

Oren Beck .

www.campdownunder.com

" Mixing radwaste with airport tarmac to make self de-icing runways "

 
Yeah, because the people in the world who really, really don't like us
don't have bazillions of dollars or anything?


Yeah, I don't think it's gonna fly.


All of which are extremely low levels of radiation.  Most nuclear
waste, certainly anything capable of generating a usable amount of
waste heat, would be significantly (as in, many orders of magnitude)
hotter.


Yes, which is why I'm asking how much radiation you think we're talking
about here.  A starting point might be to find out how much heat one of
those 55 gallon drums of concrete-encased fuel pellets gives off when it's
in Yucca Mountain's storage facility.  If one of those doesn't get hot
enough, then this isn't workable, because that's certainly more
radiation than anyone should have hanging around in a home setting
(to put it mildly).  Lots more than my tritium night-sights, or
radon, or americium-241 in the smoke detectors, etc.


OK, I thought you were asking if it's do-able.  Legal realities come
in to play, even if you don't like it.


If you make it "safe as mother's milk", it's not gonna give off enough
heat to be worthwhile.


Whic proves the point I made (but you either missed, or deliberatly
avoided) - people can't be trusted with gasoline, they do stupid stuff
with it all the time.  A stupid mistake with a nuclear source of some
sort has _much_ wider problems than the same degree of stupidity with a
mere chemical fuel source.  The public is just plain too damn dumb to
be trusted with this sort of thing, even if it could be made as safe
as reasonably possible.  Even if something radiologically safe would
give off a useful amount of heat.  Even if you could shield said source
adequately.  Even if you could get it past the legal hurdles.  Even if
you could prevent any of it being stolen by terrorists.


Are we having a serious question here, or not?  My point here is that
it might be OK for a utility-scale installation, but not for the
public to buy themselves.


No point in figuring out how to move the heat around, before you know
how much heat you're working with in the first place.


Define X as it applies here.  Hint: half life of many of the elements
in the Uranium decay series is much longer than a human time-scale.


Don't bother with transfer until you know how much heat you have
in the first place.  I think the heat output would be measurable
but trivial, for a risk that is significant.  Sounds like a non-starter
to me.

 
...

Well, we are way more frightened of a little radiation than by a lot of
lead, mercury, or the deadliest poison, pound for pound, on the earth,
nicotine. (Actually that is not entirely made up, although some spider
venoms are, I believe, slightly more toxic, and I think botulism toxin is a
close run up.) But if we were not, you might have a real argument over
whether a hundred gallons of a 3% mercury solution spilled into Puget Sound
would have more actual affect (not folk running around saying "we are all
going to die", or trying to scrub sand off the ocean floor, but real injury
as in real cancers or the like rather than projections based on very poor
and spotty low level risk assessments) than a similar amount of a low grade
radioactive waste with say 0.0001% Co60 in solution. But this argument will
never happen because it makes radioisotopes look too safe, even though they
are dangerous as hell, and if you think on it a while, you will see that we
are all lucky to be alive, because we are risking our lives every day with
even greater risks without even counting them up.