Patent Number: 041742567
Section: summary

The invention relates to a method for effecting a rotation of a mass of gas contained in a preferably rotationally symmetric housing wherein a gas discharge current flows according to an axially symmetric pattern inside a magnetic field with at least one non-zero vector component oriented normal to the electric current formed by positively charged particles extracted from said gas discharge, where the electrically charged particles from the gas discharge, which move at a high speed of rotation, set the total mass of gas into rotary motion by partial intermittent transfer of kinetic energy. Such a process is known from NASA SP-236 1970, Vol. I, pp. 140-148, among other sources. The methods of this kind known up to the present appear to suffer from various disadvantages. In the known process use is made of gaseous or vaporous uranium and hydrogen to produce a nuclear reaction. But the use of uranium vapors involves some difficulties in practice, since in that case the temperature is about 10.000.degree. K. The applicant has discovered, however, that an analogous process is very well feasible if use is made of a mass of gas consisting of a mixture of a fissionable compound such as UF.sub.6 on the one hand and light gases on the other, these light gases consisting of at least one inert gas such as helium or argon. As compared with the method known from the afore-cited NASA report, a further very important advantage is that, in the reaction chamber according to the invention, the magnetic field has the same axial direction throughout or has at least one component in this direction. This measure permits a gas rotation to be created which results in a highly effective pressure build-up. That is to say, the centrifugal field causes the mass of gas to be compressed, the pressure exponentially increasing from the axial center of the reactor towards the wall of the housing, slowly at the beginning and then very rapidly up to the wall, with a large pressure gradient to culminate at the wall in a thin layer with constant pressure. The method described can be used not only to maintain a controlled nuclear reaction, but also to separate the gaseous components of the gas mixture from each other. According to a further proposal, the process described is consequently applied by preference in such a manner that the gaseous mass is successively passed through different tiers of the housing lying one behind the other, whereby at least one of the following processes is successively brought about in the gaseous mass: (a) enrichment by separation of the heavy and light isotopes of the heavy gases mentioned. PA0 (b) nuclear fission reaction under production of heat in the fissionable gaseous mass, and PA0 (c) gaseous reprocessing of the fission products under selective discharge of these products followed by return to the tier wherein the fission reaction takes place. As a result, not only the reprocessing problem is greatly simplified and the accumulation is prevented of long-life radioactive fission products for which storage space must be found, but it is now no longer necessary to feed a reactor, designed to work with a uranium compound of a rather high degree of enrichment, with such a uranium compound in this highly enriched form. It is sufficient to supply a uranium compound with a low degree of enrichment, which may be so low that the transport of the uranium compound is perfectly safe. The energy produced by the energetic process described can be extracted in different ways from the systems required for this purpose, E.g., the reaction chamber can be cooled by a medium flowing along or through it, the heat of which is extracted in its turn for the production of electricity. It is also possible to extract the energy from the installation electromagnetically, not only from the reactor chamber itself but also from a possible MHD-section placed at the end of the cooling channel. Another method consists in using the kinetic energy of an emerging jet of light cooling gases for driving a gas turbine. The coolant mentioned can, if required, be conveyed through the reactor in a highly functional manner by feeding, adjacent the wall of the reactor housing but inside the cathode sections attached to this wall, an electrically conductive coolant through cooling coils, so that the interaction between an electric field between two electrodes in the cooling channel and a magnetic field parallel to the reactor axis results in a Lorentz force which causes the required coolant to move along. This coolant may consist, e.g., of helium gas or UF.sub.6 -gas made electrically conductive by the addition of an alkali metal, for example caesium. However, the coolant may also consist of a liquid metal, such as a sodium/potassium mixture. If a mixture of UF.sub.6 and helium or UF.sub.6 alone is used as the coolant, an additional advantage is obtained in that heat can be produced in the coolant by the neutron flux emanating from the reactor owing to the fact that part of the U.sup.235 present in the coolant is split. Extensive investigations have shown that the wall of the reaction chamber can be made very well of carbon (graphite) or of a carbon compound. The operating temperature of the proposed reactor will lie in practice between 1500.degree. and 2500.degree. K. At this temperature and pressure, the equilibrium of the system U-C-F appears to be such that the graphite wall will not be appreciably corroded while UF.sub.6 is the predominant gaseous component. The parameters of the system can easily be chosen so that 98% UF.sub.6 is in equilibrium with 1% F and 1% UF.sub.5. In this case, the degree of enrichment of the uranium in the UF.sub.6 used should be about 50% to keep the dimensions of the reaction chamber practicable, i.e. in the order of cubic meters. It is practical to line the wall of the reaction chamber on the inside with ring-shaped or cylindrical electrodes electrically insulated from each other, while the inner wall is provided with circular rows of openings giving admission to the annular cavities surrounded and flanked by cooling channels. The gas fissionable by neutron capture is compressed in the aforementioned cavities through the fast rotation of the gas vortex to a pressure at which the density of this gas becomes so high that the critical state for nuclear fission is attained. The carbon used as structural material serves simultaneously as a suitable moderator to promote the neutron reaction. To enable the separation of certain gaseous components to take place so that the selective discharge of a component becomes possible, a number of separation chambers is defined by a group of successive annular or cylindrical electrodes, the farthest rings or cylinders having the smallest diameter of the group, while the interjacent rings or cylinders culminate from both sides gradually in a largest diameter. The form of such a chamber makes it possible to discriminate between heavy and light gases. The heavy gases are compressed in the bulge of the bottle, whereas the lighter gases fill the center of the bottle also. An undesirable heavy component can in this way be discharged therefrom at the largest chamber diameter.