• 230 Posts
  • 949 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: January 2nd, 2024

help-circle










  • The existing nuclear infrastructure has its own issues, like long term waste management. My understanding is that long lived isotopes can be burned as fuel in fast breeder reactors, and the waste from those is safe in 100 years. Every nuclear power plant having enough cooling pools for 100 years worth of spent fuel is a manageable problem. But I’ve read that somewhere in that cycle some pretty nasty stuff gets generated & if it were stolen it could be used to make a potent radiological weapon. I think that’s why building the things has been a non-starter in USA - we’ve been in a cold Civil War for the last 161 years, and I think MAGA would do a nuclear terrorism if we gave them the opportunity.

    But yeah, iron powder is a drop in replacement for coal in stationary, utility scale electrical generation.

    Iron powder is easier to transport than hydrogen. Hydrogen needs high pressure, cryogenically cooled tanks. It turns any metal it touches brittle. And it boils off over time, losing some of its energy value during transport and storage.

    Iron powder is safer and cheaper to transport than ammonia, which also needs a pressurized tank and would be a major disaster if it spilled. Reprocessing rust back into iron using hydrogen is also orders of magnitude more efficient than converting hydrogen into ammonia.

    All iron powder needs for transport is a shipping container full of nitrogen gas, with a rubber gasket to keep it somewhat air tight. If it spills its just a pile of rocks.

    And if the source of renewable energy is co-located with the electrolysis plant, the rust recharging plant, and the thermal power plant, the cycle’s excess O2 from electrolysis and nitrogen gas production can be pumped into the burner of the power plant, increasing efficiency and eliminating nitric acid pollution.







  • I love the Kerbal-esque architecture of this mission.

    -An ion drive stage drops it down a deep hole, toward the sun, then spends all its fuel slowing down almost enough to be captured by Mercury’s gravity instead of just flying by it at screaming fast speed. The empty fuel tanks and ion engines get thrown away when they’re used up.

    -Then one of the stacked probes turns on its chemical engines for the capture burn, and it ditches some of its sun screen.

    -When its just barely captured in a highly elliptical polar orbit, it releases a satellite equipped with its own independent systems.

    -Then it maneuvers to a lower orbit that’s optimal for the other satellite.

    Mercury is hard to get to, and only one other space craft has ever orbited it: MESSENGER. Now there will be 2 more delivered with a single launch.