The Hybrid

Nuclear power is a bit controversial. On the one hand, we’re poisoning our planet with CO2 every second we’re not using nuclear power. On the other hand, every second that we do use nuclear power, we’re producing nuclear waste that’ll poison our planet in a few million years. And let’s not forget humanity: we need power. Our population is growing exponentially, and it’ll continue to do that until there are a lot of people on Earth, and they’ll need a lot of energy. We should probably come up with a solution to all this, if we want to survive as a species, and especially if we want to become those cool sci-fi rulers-of-the-galaxy that we’ve always wanted to be. For those of you who are not familiar with how current nuclear power plants work, let me give you a quick run-down of it: we’re essentially causing chain fission reactions, in which nuclei of uranium atoms (or other fissile materials) are split by neutrons. Essentially, we’re shooting little neutrons at the big uranium and causing it to break. In the process we get energy, and a few neutrons as well. Here’s a little animation to illustrate this:

The problem arises with the leftovers: what do you do with split nuclei? Our solution so far has been to store them in big barrels and let the next generation decide what to do with them; a pretty solid strategy until you realize that you’re the next generation. Well, what else can we do? We can leave it alone, we can run away, or we can come up with a better solution. That better solution might involve fusion reactions. Fusion is pretty much the reverse of fission: we take two smaller nuclei, and smoosh them together to make a bigger one. Again, we get energy back, but this time we get many more neutrons. We can theoretically use fusion by itself, but it turns out that fusion doesn’t produce that much energy, so let’s shelf that idea for now. What we can do is harness the power of fusion to catalyse fission in a hybrid nuclear reactor. We’ll be generating neutrons from the fusion reactions, and use them in the fission reactions. Because more neutrons are produced in fusion, we’ll be able to hit more uranium, and extract more energy from the fuel. Not only that, but we can continue to hit the leftovers, and slowly turn them into uranium; yeah, that’s right, we’ll be turning nuclear waste into fuel. The result of this is a highly efficient and environmentally friendly way of producing energy, and it turns out there’s more. If we do it right, we can make these reactors tiny, meaning we’ll be able to implement them into almost anything that uses electricity. And yeah, in case you were wondering, that does include spaceships. Yes! We’ve finally done it! The galaxy will be ours at last, with our highly efficient and non-polluting fleet of spaceships. Now the only thing standing in our way is getting all this “off the ground”…