There exists hundreds of operating second generations nuclear fission reactors making negative carbon electricity all around the world. Fission reactors offer a renewable way to make endless electricity with fuel breeding & nuclear waste conversion to new fuel in breeder reactors like Fast Neutron or Integral Fast Reactors. 4th Gen Fission reactors will make clean carbon free or negative carbon electricity for 10+ billion people for millions of years.
Nuclear electric spacecraft have the highest iSP or specific impulse, giving spacecraft powered by nuclear energy the ability to go further & reach deep places in space, faster with abundant electricity onboard the craft to make electromagnetic fields to acts as shielding against high velocity particles & radiation possible with less massive heavy physical shielding to protect human passengers from cancer, the primary health problem caused by radiation exposure in space.
Nuclear energy the only base load technology that can operate regardless of what the weather doing outside, or what climate is doing. With water recycling from the cooling loops in Gen 4 reactors, endless power can be made from a system that does not rely on water from a large natural body of water, but which takes the condensed cooling water from heat exchangers & runs it back to extract waste heat from the reactor in an endless closed loop powered by energy from the reactor. These cooling loops can also be designed to operate as passive thermosiphon systems without pumps, meaning completely automatic no human intervention passive cooling with the least amount of complexity, fewest components & most robust design.
Furthermore, waste heat from the reactor can be concentrated with heat pumps & Stirling engine generators to further improve the electric power output of the reactor & make better use of all the heat generated by fission. I am not even talking about all the other benefits of radioactive isotopes in medicine, for spacecraft & for mining & research. I am not even promoting nuclear fusion here, just improved 4th Gen. Fission Reactors, which are already under construction in Korea & China & India!
While the USA developed microwave weapons, they stopped improving the designs because of ethical constraints, at least officially. Russia & China on the other hand continued to develop compact mobile electronic directed energy weapons that convert electricity from a vehicle or a battery, into a tight laser like beam of microwave energy that causes the microwave audio effect on the target victim. Typically people, usually working for governments, are targeted while sleeping. A van with the pulsed microwave weapon pulls up & the driver or accomplice articulates the beam output of this device to aim it at the room containing the target victim, who is usually sleeping. Inside the room, pulsing sound, clicking or chirping noises that saturate the room are experienced by the victims as unbearably loud sounds that also knock out their vision or ability to see. The microwave 1.45 GHz pulsed signal causes localized heating inside the skull. These pulsed heating events produce pressure waves from the fluid expansion. These pressure waves travel into the sinus, eyes & ears, where they create tissue damage thats also extreme disorienting, blocking the vision & hearing of the victim, with no obvious sound or light or damage or heat to the sounding building or materials. The wave form, pulse rate & frequency modulation was optimized to harm or hurt people, leaving thousands of US intelligence agents with lifelong debilitating injuries. You might be wondering what this has to do with nuclear reactors.
MMR or micro-modular reactors developed by NASA for the Pentagon, offer a 23 year continual output of 5 KW / or higher power output for shorter periods. Such an immense source of truck mountable energy can be used to power directed energy weapons, like the microwave audio effect generators, masers or lasers, of many different pulse widths, frequencies & rates, waveform & power of the beam all adjustable as parameters that can be actively tunes in the weapon. Without MMR reactor shielding, such an MMR reactor can be even smaller, like a briefcase nuke, something that can easily fit inside a windowless van or other passenger vehicle. Compact energy generating technologies significantly better than gasoline or diesel generators, are typically classified by government & not allowed to be produce or sold to the public or commercially as COTS or consumer off the shelf technologies. While I really want a compact fission generator, like the NASA Kilopower, for personal energy production offline at home; if such device fell into the wrong hands, it could be used to make a dirty bomb, just like spent nuclear waste from all those hundreds of old nuclear reactors, from their cooling pools, the spent fuel rods are extremely radioactive or energetic & full of active radio-isotopes.
Mixing spent fuel rods with conventional explosives produces a dirty bomb, that when exploded, throws toxic radioactive heavy metals & metal oxides into the air with explosive velocities, producing deadly shrapnel nearby but worse releasing radioactive heavy metals as particles, dusts, pieces, parts & fragments over great nearby distances at thousands of feet per second, where they contaminate the area with highly toxic levels of radiation. This is why they are called dirty bombs, because they dirty up the area nearby with radioactive isotope waste, actinides or transuranic mostly, raditooxins which are both toxic as metals, gases, solids & fluids, but also radio-toxic because of their ionizing radiation emissions of gamma, beta & alpha particles + energetic neutrons & CD clusters cause DNA dislocations in human cells, that result in mutagenic & carcinogenic cell degeneration; essential greatly accelerating aging.
Nuclear weapons & nuclear reactor meltdowns might be enough to slow down nuclear reactor development in America because of a corresponding related negative public sentiment, but other up & coming nations have a stronger government that does not rely on the public democratic process & what ever the head honcho says goes, so for example when Ping says in China "we are building Gen. 4 pebble bed reactors", that is what happens. There is no debate, public discourse, outreach, engagement, feedback or other democratic processes. The opposite actually true, if anyone gets in the way of the official action, they are killed or sent to a concentration re-education camp for brainwashing to get them to worship the CCP & as the supreme government on Earth. One of the only compliments I have for China, that its brutally efficient & effective at getting things done.
This is why china gets slammed with criticism for human rights violations, pollution & degradation of environments & ecosystems, including Earth's atmosphere in the biosphere near the ground where most people are breathing, with coal power emissions which are full of small toxic PM particles, smoke & soot & with some irony the great exposure source of radioactive metals & metal oxides that were present in the coal, & released as fly ash soot from the coal power plant exhaust stack or emissions from the coal power plant. Its not just CO2 & CO causing climate change & brain damage, the particle or PM2.5 & similar + the toxic heavy metals & radioactive elements released, those are what make coal power emissions extremely damaging to human & environmental health. Nuclear offers one of the only ways to meaningfully phase out coal power plant with a well designed Gen 4. fission reactor offer an LCOE of only $68 per MW of installed capacity. Operating 24/7 for up to 48 months per run, Nuclear Plants also offer best best load capacity per installed MW. Renewables like Wind & Solar with enough battery for 24/7 output, cost at least 6X more.
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