Fusion energy from… hydrogen bombs. Is there a way? Maybe underground explosions with water pumped in, turning to high-pressure steam, and powering a turbine?
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.
The best way of doing this, is to have a big steel hollow sphere with vacuum inside. A detonation of a hydrogen bomb in the center would warm the sphere and some steam engines on the outside could harness this power.
The problem is, that the vacuum should be very high and the sphere quite large, so the outside pressure is an important factor. So you should place this gadget into orbit, where the cooling is not very simple. Nor the electricity transport back to Earth.
Otherwise, it’s a good solution. This way we could have had fusion electricity some time ago. Perhaps with small hydrogen bombs a.k.a. neutron bombs. Otherwise those steel spheres would have to be too big to be stable on Earth.
The sphere would need to be extremely large to be able to absorb the energy of a nuclear weapon without being blown apart. Most of the radiated energy (being of the form of soft x-rays and UV) is going to be absorbed in the first cm or so of material. Assuming you use iron (a good choice as iron is plentiful), the limit is around the 100 kJ/m^2 range, which means that for a 100 kiloton (418 terajoule) nuclear weapon your shell would have to have a surface area on the order of 4.18 billion m^2, or a radius of 31 km. Assuming you could design an ultra-material with one MJ/m^2 absorption ability, it’s 10 km, but then you’d have to overcome problems of ablation and spalling. You could get by with a smaller nuke and maybe reduce to < 1km, but the nukes would be so expensive it would be much cheaper to just use solar power at that point.
Nukes not need to be too expensive. A mass production would bring their price down.
Still, big empty spheres would pose a problem. Perhaps we should put them on the top of a 20 kilometers high tower and cool them with the water pumped up.
An explosion of 1 Mt every hour would mean about 1000 GW of raw power. Several of those would be currently more than enough.
Mass production wouldn’t necessarily make them less expensive than they already are. During the cold war the USA and USSR effectively mass-produced thousands of warheads. Official cost estimates for the manufacture cost aren’t available but it seems that the US government managed to bring the cost of plutonium down from about $100,000/g to $500/g or so (The price of plutonium for civilians using it for chemistry purposes is currently around ten times that, however, and it’s obviously an extremely restricted and regulated substance). A nuclear weapon needs about 2 kg of plutonium minimum, so that’s about $1,000,000 per warhead at the very least.
It’s a bargain. Even one billion US$ per day for the bombs, would be like nothing. We are talking about the energy output comparable with all the others (coal, oil, gas, nuclear, hydro …) combined!
Not necessarily. Plutonium has about 90 TJ/kg energy density. At $500/g, that comes out to about 180 MJ/$, or 2 c/kWh. That’s only a bit below half of coal’s 4.63 c/kWh. And this is only for the fuel! If you were to go the all-plutonium route, it would probably wind up being more expensive than coal.
Fusion energy from… hydrogen bombs. Is there a way? Maybe underground explosions with water pumped in, turning to high-pressure steam, and powering a turbine?
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.
Not so crazy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_PACER
The best way of doing this, is to have a big steel hollow sphere with vacuum inside. A detonation of a hydrogen bomb in the center would warm the sphere and some steam engines on the outside could harness this power.
The problem is, that the vacuum should be very high and the sphere quite large, so the outside pressure is an important factor. So you should place this gadget into orbit, where the cooling is not very simple. Nor the electricity transport back to Earth.
Otherwise, it’s a good solution. This way we could have had fusion electricity some time ago. Perhaps with small hydrogen bombs a.k.a. neutron bombs. Otherwise those steel spheres would have to be too big to be stable on Earth.
The sphere would need to be extremely large to be able to absorb the energy of a nuclear weapon without being blown apart. Most of the radiated energy (being of the form of soft x-rays and UV) is going to be absorbed in the first cm or so of material. Assuming you use iron (a good choice as iron is plentiful), the limit is around the 100 kJ/m^2 range, which means that for a 100 kiloton (418 terajoule) nuclear weapon your shell would have to have a surface area on the order of 4.18 billion m^2, or a radius of 31 km. Assuming you could design an ultra-material with one MJ/m^2 absorption ability, it’s 10 km, but then you’d have to overcome problems of ablation and spalling. You could get by with a smaller nuke and maybe reduce to < 1km, but the nukes would be so expensive it would be much cheaper to just use solar power at that point.
Nukes not need to be too expensive. A mass production would bring their price down.
Still, big empty spheres would pose a problem. Perhaps we should put them on the top of a 20 kilometers high tower and cool them with the water pumped up.
An explosion of 1 Mt every hour would mean about 1000 GW of raw power. Several of those would be currently more than enough.
Mass production wouldn’t necessarily make them less expensive than they already are. During the cold war the USA and USSR effectively mass-produced thousands of warheads. Official cost estimates for the manufacture cost aren’t available but it seems that the US government managed to bring the cost of plutonium down from about $100,000/g to $500/g or so (The price of plutonium for civilians using it for chemistry purposes is currently around ten times that, however, and it’s obviously an extremely restricted and regulated substance). A nuclear weapon needs about 2 kg of plutonium minimum, so that’s about $1,000,000 per warhead at the very least.
It’s a bargain. Even one billion US$ per day for the bombs, would be like nothing. We are talking about the energy output comparable with all the others (coal, oil, gas, nuclear, hydro …) combined!
Not necessarily. Plutonium has about 90 TJ/kg energy density. At $500/g, that comes out to about 180 MJ/$, or 2 c/kWh. That’s only a bit below half of coal’s 4.63 c/kWh. And this is only for the fuel! If you were to go the all-plutonium route, it would probably wind up being more expensive than coal.
High-yield fusion would be another matter.
You have to have fusion. With fision you have to clean too much.
And the OP wanted the fusion as well.
Project Daedalus has the same basic concept. It’s a very interesting topic to research and might give you some insight on this topic.