The Fountain Fusion/Fission Hybrid Reactor.
Posted: Sat Feb 12, 2011 1:51 am
Background:
When you have a jet of water aimed upward in a pond and the nozzle is slightly under the surface, you get a big hump of water shaped like the top of an egg. These can be quite large and sometimes you see them in sewage treatment or decorative fountains. The height is determined by the nozzle exit velocity (and gravity) and the diameter is determined by the flow rate.
So use a large parabolic shaped bowl set in a flat table (like a bathroom sink) with a big a pipe run up through the bottom at its center, with the volume of the bowl too small to achieve criticality. The overflow of the bowl runs over the side and down, passing through integral heat exchangers and then back to the infeed of the large centrifugal pump.
When the pump is running you should get a big fountain effect, turning the volume in the bowl into a big mounded egg shape and raising the core to criticality. The volume in the core is determined by the pump velocity (easily controlled) and would ebb within a second of turning off the pump. Any leakage or blockage would reduce the flow volume and thus the size of the core.
You could run single fluid of dissolved nuclear waste in a molten salt stream.
One important advantage of this reactor topology is that the nuclear fission reaction shuts off almost immediately upon power failure, with the size of the roughly spherical nuclear core determined dynamically by a fast acting control system. Another advantage is that a major perturbation in temperature or sudden a outgassing event in the core would tend to reconfigure the core into a non-critical shape, as the core is a dynamic mound above the natural height of the fluid bowl.
You could also include a low melting point alloy in the pump vanes (an extra fail safe) or in the exit nozzle, or even change the exit pattern of the nozzle with bimetallic deflection elements to help shape the core based on fluid temperature.
this system required pumping very radioactive and highly viscous core fluids, and the exact core shape will slightly vary from moment to moment. The High viscosity of the core fluid would provide a good level of topological inertia to retain a shape that would support stable reactor criticality.
The upcoming series of posts will describe how this fountain reactor concept will support a wide array of possible fission/fission hybrid topologies base on various low fluence neutron producing small fusion architectures including polywell, but first a number of supporting concepts but first be introduced.
When you have a jet of water aimed upward in a pond and the nozzle is slightly under the surface, you get a big hump of water shaped like the top of an egg. These can be quite large and sometimes you see them in sewage treatment or decorative fountains. The height is determined by the nozzle exit velocity (and gravity) and the diameter is determined by the flow rate.
So use a large parabolic shaped bowl set in a flat table (like a bathroom sink) with a big a pipe run up through the bottom at its center, with the volume of the bowl too small to achieve criticality. The overflow of the bowl runs over the side and down, passing through integral heat exchangers and then back to the infeed of the large centrifugal pump.
When the pump is running you should get a big fountain effect, turning the volume in the bowl into a big mounded egg shape and raising the core to criticality. The volume in the core is determined by the pump velocity (easily controlled) and would ebb within a second of turning off the pump. Any leakage or blockage would reduce the flow volume and thus the size of the core.
You could run single fluid of dissolved nuclear waste in a molten salt stream.
One important advantage of this reactor topology is that the nuclear fission reaction shuts off almost immediately upon power failure, with the size of the roughly spherical nuclear core determined dynamically by a fast acting control system. Another advantage is that a major perturbation in temperature or sudden a outgassing event in the core would tend to reconfigure the core into a non-critical shape, as the core is a dynamic mound above the natural height of the fluid bowl.
You could also include a low melting point alloy in the pump vanes (an extra fail safe) or in the exit nozzle, or even change the exit pattern of the nozzle with bimetallic deflection elements to help shape the core based on fluid temperature.
this system required pumping very radioactive and highly viscous core fluids, and the exact core shape will slightly vary from moment to moment. The High viscosity of the core fluid would provide a good level of topological inertia to retain a shape that would support stable reactor criticality.
The upcoming series of posts will describe how this fountain reactor concept will support a wide array of possible fission/fission hybrid topologies base on various low fluence neutron producing small fusion architectures including polywell, but first a number of supporting concepts but first be introduced.