Remove ads

Fusion in the 1970s

Reader mode
Cloak&Dagger said:
I'm definitely skeptical of a fusion power plant in the 70's, but a thermonuclear power plant seems possible. It works in bombe, clearly.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
A bomb is an easier way to achieve fusion than a reactor. Why? Bombs don't need reusability or a self-sustaining reaction, they just need to ignite a single strong pulse.
 
The Club members will only want existing members to have fusion reactors, since the neutron flux can be used to breed plutonium. On the other hand Brazil will demand one since they're supplying the niobium and South Africa the tungsten, etc.

Sandy River DL said:
A bomb is an easier way to achieve fusion than a reactor. Why? Bombs don't need reusability or a self-sustaining reaction, they just need to ignite a single strong pulse.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

There was some thought of fusion bomb hydrothermal (repeatedly detonate bombs in a water-filled underground chamber and use the steam to generate power) but apparently the engineering and geological requirements weren't practical.
 
Last edited:
Mad Bad Rabbit said:
There was some thought of fusion bomb hydrothermal (repeatedly detonate bombs in a water-filled underground chamber and use the steam to generate power) but apparently the engineering and geological requirements weren't practical.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Yeah, one of the ideas tested in Operation Plowshare and, like basically everything else involved, far too impractical and expensive to actually go anywhere. Big, cheap, bombs were too large to be workable and the smaller bombs cost way too much even break even.
 
RoseEmbolism said:
The main issue I see is that one really can't "just have fusion power" in the 70s, any more than we can just have machine learning. Fusion is a fiendishly difficult proposition, well beyond the technology of the time, so I think you'd have to have something SFional that acts like fusion, yet really isn't.

So here's a few possibilities:
  • Runaway: Unlike normal fusion, this is a zero-point energy process that extracts energy from the Quantum Foam using a self-sustaining field effect. Using it to heat is how you get a working fluid to run a magnetohydrodynamic power plant. The problem is, if it runs wild, they're may be no stopping it.
  • Product of a crashed UFO: Flying Saucers are very 70s. It's basically a weird literally black box technology that we really don't understand, though we can duplicate them. Actually, we don't-they duplicate themselves under the exactly right conditions. And if we make too many of them, the aliens will notice. Better set up a UFO defence agency hidden as a movie studio...
  • Espers: what's more 70s than ESP? This fusion system requires telekinetics to, I dunno, convince the plasma to choose it something. But aside from the limited supply of espers, there's the fact that some of them might not want jobs as living power generators, or others may have more selfish, sinister uses for their abilities...
  • Dimensional Weirdness: you get your energy by opening a crack in the space tone continuum. This can have all kinds of weirdness ranging from time and space distortion, time ghosts, people from alternate universes, dinosaurs...and the longer it goes on, the more "corrupted" the area gets (The Zone, The Southern Expanse, etc.)
  • It's an evil plot: But they were, all of them, deceived, for another Fusion Reactor was made. In the land of California, in the fires of Stanford, the Dark Lord Teller forged in secret a master Fusion Reactor, to control all others. And into this Fusion Reactor he poured his cruelty, his malice and his will to dominate all life. One Fusion Reactor to rule them all...
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Other possibilities:

- Some sort of rare naturally occurring science fictional material that makes it much easier to generate and control powerful magnetic fields or otherwise manipulate plasma, kind of like Avatar "unobtanium." If it's more common in e.g. metallic asteroids than in Earth's crust, might be a good incentive for space colonization. Would have consequences in other areas of technology.

- Some kind of rare naturally occurring science fictional "nuclear catalyst" that makes it easier to achieve fusion (I think this what Babylon 5's "quantium 40" supposedly is). Might also be a good incentive for space colonization if it's mostly found off Earth. Possibly its existence was first suspected when astronomers observed a rare type of supernova triggered by some naturally occurring large quantity of this "nuclear catalyst" falling into a star.
 
Memphet'ran said:
Some kind of rare naturally occurring science fictional "nuclear catalyst" that makes it easier to achieve fusion
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

The problem with Magic Space Rocks such as Quantium-40, Element Zero, Dilithium, Unobtanium, Kryptonite or whatever is that you NEED the magic space rocks.

Ordinary D-T fusion might currently be technologically impractical, but there's no 'magic' needed for it. Using a Lithium-6 breeder liner solves some of the fuel/neutron radiation issues as well as it fissions into tritium and helium under fast neutron bombardment.
 
On the whole "oil company intimidation and propaganda stuff" front, your new department could have Shanghaied the Department of Energy's Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, using them to run a counter-propaganda program.

If you wanted to go even further then you could have SAVAK attempt to begin influencing politicians as well.
 
[
RoseEmbolism said:
Well, you could do the scheme where a thermonuclear device is detonated underground, and then pump water into the still- red hot chamber to make steam. They actually ran the numbers on that and found out...it was a bad idea.

Oh here we go, Project Pacer
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Let's detonate a 50 kiloton warhead every 12 hours, to generate ... let's see, 2 GW is 2x10^6 kW, times 12 hours, times $0.11 per kWh ... about 2.6 million dollars worth of electricity, from a $5 million dollar warhead. 🤔
 
The general idea i had was the Department of the Threshold took the Bioshock Infinite approach and basically stole/bartered/scavenged the the know-how and science from the Otherplane, which is sort of a superpositioned dimension like the warp/noosphere/nevernever, but with techological civilizations as well as magic and other weird shit. It's also possible the otherplane has access to parallel realities in itself, so the tech may be third-hand even.
 
Vadrigos said:
So after some further consideration, i've decided the fusion in this setting will be deuterium-based, since helium 3 mining isn't really viable until you have some sort of jovian energy fleet (cursed though that name may be). And while there probably will be a moonbase, it's going to be more like Prey's Pytheas Outpost or For All Mankind's thing than something from the movie Moon. However, to circumvent the radiation problem, I'm going to add a handwavy 'rad-leeching gel' substance loosely based on a real world substance being proposed to cleanup radiation particulates in the environment. This will then be stored in designated facilities in Nevada until some other recycling solution is found. Meanwhile, I may steal a few more things from Prey's timeline while I'm at it…
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

You can probably do most if not all of the things you want fusion to do in the timeline with the same nuclear fission concepts that have existed since nuclear technology was first invented. Almost every major technology in nuclear energy was first theorized back during the Manhattan Project. The molten salt reactor is a notable exception, but that was still theorized back in the 1950s.
 
Delta Force said:
You can probably do most if not all of the things you want fusion to do in the timeline with the same nuclear fission concepts that have existed since nuclear technology was first invented. Almost every major technology in nuclear energy was first theorized back during the Manhattan Project. The molten salt reactor is a notable exception, but that was still theorized back in the 1950s.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Probably, but fusion is more 'alt-hist'. Also, I already wrote it in.
 
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top