From: dietz@cs.rochester.edu (Paul Dietz)
Newsgroups: sci.space
Subject: Re: Nick Szabo Disinformation debunking (Re: Clinton and Space Funding)
Date: 27 Sep 92 23:49:43 GMT
Organization: Computer Science Department University of Rochester

In article <27SEP199216051882@judy.uh.edu> wingo%cspara.decnet@Fedex.Msfc.Nasa.Gov writes:

>>Wrong.  The CRBR was cut mainly because it was completely unnecessary.
>>The need for a fast-track development of breeders was predicated in
>>the assumption that world-wide uranium consumption would grow much
>>faster than it has.  Today, the spot market price for uranium is
>>around $10/lb.  Breeder reactors makes no sense at all at this price.

> The French do not seem to think so. They still have an active breeder
> program.  My sister happens to live near the CRBR and your memory has
> to be real short not to remember the political wrangling that went on
> with the anti-nukers and that project.


In fact, the US also has an active breeder reactor program.  We've had
a successful research breeder, the EBR-II, in operation for more than
two decades.  People at Argonne and elsewhere are exploring a small
(100 MW) breeder concept based on EBR-II, called the Integral Fast
Breeder, a passively safe concept.  There are advantages to not
being prematurely locked into a concept that would now be obsolete.

The French experience actually proves the point, I think.  Superphenix
has proved to be unreliable and uneconomic.  It's been shut down for
two years now with intractible sodium leaks, and there is serious
doubt it will ever be restarted.  It's the Concorde of the nuclear
industry.

The Japanese have a fast reactor program, but are reorienting it to
act as a plutonium burner, not breeder.  Even this seems pretty
silly, as you can burn plutonium in thermal reactors.

 > No synfuels was abandoned as not cost effective and polluting.
 > Remember it was the Democratic congress and gas rationing that would
 > have made this work.  It was Ronnie Raygun that killed the beast even
 > before gas prices started coming down.

Ronnie dropped the pork, but if it had been cost effective the
oil companies would have picked it up.  They didn't, because it made
no sense economically.


 >>As for intra-solarsystem propulsion, it would be economic idiocy to
 >>work on fusion just because we might have a use for fusion rockets in
 >>100 years.

 > Well then Paul there are some awfully smart idiots out there proposing
 > that very thing.  I saw a wonderful IAF presentation on this subject
 > at the World Space Congress.  The technology is near term and actually
 > easier to achieve than a fully contained fusion.  The delta vee is so
 > high that a Mars trip is 90 days and a Jupiter trip was only 120 days.


And what's better, these rockets are made entirely out of paper,
ink and viewgraph plastic, all cheap materials!

The fusion rocket concepts (we can't dignify them with the name
"design") I've seen are enormous, many thousands of tons.  They are
complicated.  They depend on large extrapolation from known physics
and engineering.  They subject materials to a great deal of stress and
neutron bombardment.  They must operate in space with almost no
maintenance.

Existing inertial confinement fusion experiments might implode one
pellet per *day*.  Fusion rocket concepts I've seen implode up to 400
per *second*.

The US can't seem to develop even a smallish space fission reactor.
Development of a space fusion rocket would be orders of magnitude
harder.

 > continue to push forward.  It is fun to see that the predictions of the
 > doomsayers in the 60's and 70's were off so bad. This happy result is
 > due to advances in technology, many of them space flight oriented.

Bullshit.  The improvements that averted the "doom-and-gloom" had
damned little to do with spaceflight.  The most important, the green
revolution, was underway well before the "space age".  Much of the
rest was simply that the doomsters didn't understand anything about
abundance of terrestrial resources.  A fault the Space Fans share, I
might add.

	Paul F. Dietz
	dietz@cs.rochester.edu
Newsgroups: sci.space