To reduce air pollution, energize electrical grids to charge electric vehicles, to desalinate sea water & to make green hydrogen, to decarbonize transportation, its fuel breeding fission reactors that have the most positive potential to improve energy systems on Earth, on the Moon & Mars & in spacecraft & space stations, where solar PV too limited especially & where the fuel mass paradox of chemical rockets limits space access with high cost per unit of mass launched & can never enable big scale space development. To greatly reduce air pollution toxic to public health, to make more clean renewable electricity, we urgently need more new nuclear reactors, the best of IFR or or fuel breeding reactors that make more fuel than they consume by enriching fertile elements placed in with the fuel bundles to make new fertile fuel elements that continue energizing the fission processes! We are talking about clean renewable nuclear energy for 10 billion people for thousands of years!
In the world we find ordinary matter & energy, the applications of energy with intelligence enabling human activity to manipulate matter for the accomplishment of the wide variety of tasks that mankind engages in the biosphere of Earth & in lower Earth Orbit on the International Space Station & similar
Fire was the original way that man figured out how to harness chemical reaction energy to make heat for cooking animals they hunted with sharp spears & other hunting tools from early human history. Fire is also the only common visible chemical reaction that a normal person encounters outside of watching more interesting chemistry demo's on chemistry oriented content videos online, on YouTube for example.
Light another form of energy, making it with electricity made via other means enables lamp & bulbs technology electrically powered to replace oil burning & wick based candles & gas lamps & similar that predated the light bulbs creation as a then new technology.
From early incandescent other forms of lighting were developed, like halogen filled with xenon in fuzed quarts envelops. Low & then high pressure sodium lamps connected to a magnetic ballast. Metal halide, mercury vapor, fluorescent tubs & then CFL, metal halide, short arc, microwave sulfur, LED, diode lasers, Raman emitter, direct energy conversion emergent with 99.99% electrical energy to light conversion, 50x longer life than traditional LED, lower cost & no toxic IC manufacturing technique needed with graphene based Raman emitter lighting supplanting all other lighting technologies in the near future, the next big thing after daylight colored LED's finish their commercial diffusion worldwide in the early 2030's.
During the age of gas laser development, before diode lasers, nuclear fission reactors were being rapidly improved. The 1960's in America was a dynamic time with lots of applied technology being commercialized & before the age of globalization with much more limited global trade. The USD or United States Dollar was stronger & the Saturn V rocket Apollo program at NASA sent men & silver oxide battery powered buggies to the Moon. Intel went into full scale production & rapid improvement of IC or integrated circuit designs & manufacturing. Nuclear Tech stalled because of Three Mile Island in the 1980s.
The cost of building nuclear reactors kept increasing while the costs of Wind Power turbines & Solar Photovoltaic panels continued to drop. These intermittent sources can not really compete with a nuclear reactors, without significant & costly pairing with energy storage to improve uptime & capacity factor or wind & solar renewable energy. Nuclear provides an unmatched non carbon way to make abundance amounts of electricity by exploiting the radioactive properties of natural radioactive minerals mined from the ground, near Earth's surface.
IFR & other fuel breeding nuclear reactors emerged as a way to breed radioactive fertile elements into fissile fuels ready for use in nuclear fission reactors to make electric to power electrical grids connected to utility customers 24/7 uptime & great capacity factor, most of the 400 2nd generation fission reactors are lower efficiency 1960's designed that make electricity continually & lots of waster heat that can be used to desalinate sea water or for other purposes, with uptime up 1-3 years before core rebuilt refueling with new radioactive fuel bundles. There are many cool new nuclear energy technologies being developed from the tiny KILOWATT Stirling engine system for a NASA moon base, to militarily MMR inside common shipping containers, to slightly bigger SMR's as single units or as groups in utility substation sized applications, to large BWR reactor complexes with gigawatt output on thousands of acres of land. Nearly every big nuclear reactor built was paid for with Government funding since private equity too impatient to have billions of dollars tied up for 20 years, even if the ROI long term 9000% or better, which is the case with Nuclear Fission reactors operated for 50+ years.
Nuclear Energized Decarbonization or NED very important to reduce air pollution emission produced by coal combustion energy that are also toxic to public health while making climate change worse faster. Burning carbon emits toxic NOX, SOX, CO, PM, soot, smoke, particles, fly ash, & other toxins, that produce acid rain that toxic to aquatic organism in bodies of water in nature. The acid rain produced by coal power for example also causes metal infrastructure to rust & corrode faster, imposing additional economic costs or negative externalities of making electricity with dirty coal power.
Burning diesel fuel & heavy bunker oil also produces toxic emissions, soot & smoke & fumes that cause acid rain, harm human lung & brain cells & produce environmental damage by acidifying bodies of water, by pumping even more greenhouse gases into earths atmosphere. Surely these carbon sources provide a valuable role, but there is also an urgent need to decarbonize transportation & grid power energy with renewable + more new nuclear reactors.
New nuclear offers walk away automatic safety shut off without any human intervention, passive safety, even safely shutting down if all computers & power fail, if all electrical energy cut off by a storm, natural hazard, earthquake, nuclear weapon strike, hurricane, solar coronal mass ejection impact & corresponding geomagnetic electrical storm that wipes out all digital computer technology on Earth. There are intrinsically safe newer nuclear reactor designs that are completely fault tolerant or quasi unbreakable, unable to be damaged, without the ability to meltdown under any conditions, the safest of all energy production, Nuclear already offers a way to make electricity without burning carbon, aside from inside the machines that mine & ship the nuclear fuel elements.
With nuclear fuel breeding reactors we can make 6 kw continually for each of 10 billion people for thousands of years, without burning carbon, especially once those mining vehicles used to render nuclear fuel elements, fertile & fissile, are battery electric, with solar roof charging & grid connected charging energized by nuclear reactors. In the future all electricity will come from non directly polluting source, such that all commercial power reactors in the future will not burn or combust fuel, but will capture & concentrate & store natural energy from the environment, from the movement of water or wind or from sunlight or ground heat or by using intelligence & physics to make greatly enhance future nuclear reactors that have 98% fuel element to electricity conversion, can breed more fuel than they consume with overparity, have small highly controlled short lived waste, burning all the actinides in improved fission & have valuable product potential to also make green hydrogen, isotopes for medical imaging & cancer treatments, special elements for RTG thermocouple energy generators used on space probes, space stations, habitation modules on the Moon & Mars.
We need nuclear powered rockets to overcome the energy limitation of combustion rocket engines that have specific impulse measured in just a few hundred seconds before the engine overheats & the fuel tanks run out of fuel, even cryogenic hydrogen & cryogenic oxygen liquid fueled rockets with the best specific impulse have the same fuel mass paradox, thus necessitating the use of nuclear fission & fusion drive technology for stellar development of a space based human civilization now emerging in the 4IR or 4th Industrial Revolution of Applied Information Technology, with artificial intelligence trending to make even better quantum compute technology commercialize, to enable amazing robots to move like humans at Boston Dynamics with Atlas for example, its really only the battery technology limiting robots from doing more, well, and energy goblins von Neumann style digital computer, the same kind of battery sucking chips in your existing smart devices, on your wrist, in your pocket.
A humanoid robot needs thousands of watts of gaming computer level computer to move & do like a real human, so even the best lithium ion batteries only give 10-40 minutes of runtime. Stationary humanoid robots used in manufacturing or repairing complex objects like smartphones or automatic wrist watches or other high complexity custom hearing aid manufacturing or smartwatch teardown for e-waste recycling, delicate surgery, when these robots are plugged into grid energy that can overcome the limitations of chemical batteries, by using electricity made by solar panels, wind power turbines, tidal or wave energy capture, geothermal power, nuclear reactors or any other commercial power production technology or energy storage technology.
We have lots of existing & emergent ways to make abundant amounts of clean renewable energy & I think fuel breeding nuclear fission reactors have the most potential to energize large electrical grids like the ones in the United States that urgently need distribution repairs & upgrades today, N+1 upgrades to reduce power outages & other electrical utility improvements to make use of new technologies like super capacitors, flywheel energy storage & better switching, control & voltage stabilization, improve load handling, better load following, better capacity factor, fewer outages & improved efficiency.
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