Uranium rods don't appear to obey the laws of physics

[Song]

At present, when you load uranium rods into your reactor (which shouldn't even work, if it's a fusion reactor, if my knowledge of physics is correctish), you get energy....and nuclear waste. Which is HEAVIER than what you put in.......and not by a small amount. It's double what you put in.

So, should radioactive waste have its mass halved, or should uranium rods get beefed up? or should we just ignore the physics here and just go with it?

[schilcote]

At present, when you load uranium rods into your reactor (which shouldn't even work, if it's a fusion reactor, if my knowledge of physics is correctish), you get energy....and nuclear waste. Which is HEAVIER than what you put in.......and not by a small amount. It's double what you put in.

So, should radioactive waste have its mass halved, or should uranium rods get beefed up? or should we just ignore the physics here and just go with it?

Maybe the weight is that of the barrel.

As for fission in a fusion reactor, yeah. That's not very likely to work.

[Bobby]

Perhaps it is contaminating your other fuel too?

As for using it in a fusion reactor... burning uranium might release some energy, I would imagine it would be terribly inefficient and slow down the reaction though. Another question is how are you getting solid uranium pellets into the fusion chamber through a gas line, and won't it clog things up when the vaporized heavy metals condense in the exuast? Assuming it didn't just kill the reactor immediately it'd probably be like running a gasoline engine on straight used cooking grease, in other words not likely.

[Aury]

You get radioactive waste? Have not seen that >.>

[digdug]

UF6 (uranium hexafluoride) can easily sublime to a gas. (triple point is at 64°C, 1.5bar)

And fusion-fission reactors that can process multiple types of fuel are theoretically possible, and there are a couple of prototype designs out there:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/28 ... aste_plan/
http://www.utexas.edu/news/2009/01/27/nuclear_hybrid/

About the waste that doubles the weight, I don't know
But it looks fair to me you can run on dirty nuclear fuel, but you get clogged by lots of waste.

What would be interesting is a commonwealth behavior, where commonwealth ships and stations will check for illegal dumping of nuclear waste. (commonwealth would fine you as soon as you dock to a station ?)

[Star Weaver]

Wolfy: I didn't notice it until I was skimming through ItemsMisc.xml. It also turns up as one of the vanilla examples of OverlayType, esp. if you're inclined to use grep to find such things .

Digdug: Wow, that would be really annoying. I'll just throw it on a wreck and explode the wreck like I do with other trash though .

[Aury]

*Is surprised that he has noticed the magically appearing barrels of waste*

[Song]

*Is surprised that he has noticed the magically appearing barrels of waste*

Yeah, took me a while as well.

I do wonder how the magic barrels appear. perhaps it's an iocrym conspiracy.....or a race of sentient trans-dimensional barrels bent on controlling all, but going about it in entirely the wrong way?

We'll never know.....

[SiaFu]

The 'feature' of the magical waste barrels is that they appear as unidentified barrels, perhaps that's why people don't notice them.

You'd think that a person capable of piloting a starship (i.e. your game alter-ego) would be able to deduce what's that gunk coming out of the reactor after feeding it low-grade fuel...

I've made an override for that reason: making Uranium Rod spawned Radioactive Waste barrels identified.

[Prophet]

I think we're all assuming it's using current technology.

Perhaps the Uraniums is split in a primary reaction into smaller atoms and some of those are then pushed into the fusion reactor, with excess isotopes that don't fuse constituting the waste.

Where the barrels come from though, is a mystery. Especially that they are unidentified (nice work SiaFu!)

[schilcote]

Where the barrels come from though, is a mystery.

I think I know.

[Song]

I think we're all assuming it's using current technology.

Perhaps the Uraniums is split in a primary reaction into smaller atoms and some of those are then pushed into the fusion reactor, with excess isotopes that don't fuse constituting the waste.

Where the barrels come from though, is a mystery. Especially that they are unidentified (nice work SiaFu!)

Either that, or they have truly astonishing technology allowing them to fuse past iron, and as a result of the astonishingness of it simply do not know what the heck is coming out at the end of the process...

[Shifter55]

Or they just use the slow neutrons from the fusion reaction to split the uranium.

[Ttech]

How do you use these wase barrels though? You can't make goodies from it like a waste cannon?

[Song]

How do you use these wase barrels though? You can't make goodies from it like a waste cannon?

Well, the big question is 'Why would you want to?'

Waste cannons really, REALLY suck...