Does anyone know which was developed first? Atomic energy or the atomic bomb? I'd bet it was the atomic bomb. If the research into atomic bombs was put into atomic energy research, the energy crisis would end instantly. What does this have to do with gaming? Well, that would be an interesting twist on a world. They actually did invent atomic energy first. Never even tried to make weapons with it. So, in the 1940s and 50s, when The Bomb were being developed on our world, they stopped using fossil fuels altogether, and all cars ran on atomic power. Technology advanced exponentially faster than ours from that point forward. Something tells me though that most worlds develop atomic weapons before atomic energy, however.
(Doing Therapy)
You mean, electricity from fission, not atomic energy... right?
I would be inclined to agree with you insofar as the atomic bomb predates nuclear power plants.
Of course, fusion is better than fission.
The Foundation Trilogy by Aasimov was entirely nuclear power based, if I remember. Might be worth reading into if you are interested.
Sketch up a slightly different alt-reality, John. Say, the US stays out of 'Kaiser Wilhelm's War', and a long siege/political maneuvering by Britain ends up twenty years later, breaking the Germanic Empire.....kind of a replay of the Napoleonic Wars (although I am no kind of expert on the NW).
Then Hitler goes on to being a minor painter....
And someone, probably Einstein, in Germany invents a-power....
Or something like that....
Actually, atomic energy was first. Admittedly, the first reactors weren't very good, but they needed to get their plutonium from somewhere.
You do, of course, mean electricity generated from fission.
Let's not get it confused, here; obviously, the atomic bomb uses atomic energy.
Well yeah, the first reactor, if I remember right, was under a tennis court in Chicago....and then someone in gov't had the bright idea....ummm, maybe an experimental power source in one of America's largest cities is not such a good plan.
Eh, there wasn't enough Uranium to be a serious problem.
Actually, a more full description of fission-generated electricity: See, it all started with someone discovering fission. When WWII started, everyone decided that fission would be an effective basis for a bomb. In the process of trying to develop a bomb, the USA effort made a number of low-efficiency reactors that provided them with data and Plutonium.
John, we've by now put hundreds of times more research into nuclear power than we ever did into the atomic bomb. It's a very different challenge, really. The bomb is kind of like, "How can we botch really big?" (Well, no, it's more complicated than that, but it's something like that.)
France is already using fission reactors for most of its electricity. We're not. Our decision is political, not scientific--people in this country are afraid of radiation. But as far as I know, as Kyler has said, no one is using "nuclear energy", and there aren't really a lot of plans to do so.
To clarify that, when we speak of a nuclear power plant we mean fission reactor. A fission reactor takes a large amount of radioactive metal, such as uranium, and packs it together so that the radiation of its decay will make it hot. Control systems, usually removable lead rods, are used to control the rate at which the decay heats the metal, and water or a similar liquid is passed through the hot radioactive metal. To reduce radiation transfer, the liquid passes through one side of a radiator the other side of which has a second reserve of liquid, which is heated by the first.
Now, we're talking really hot--we're talking liquid so hot that it turns to steam when it is so heated, and in doing so becomes highly pressurized. The pressure is released into turbines, which turn generators, which generate electricity. The electricity is what is given to the general public.
So to trace it backwards, we used kinetic energy to make electricity; we used pressure to make kinetic energy; we used heat to make pressure; we used radioactive decay to make heat. So our "nuclear energy" made a lot of heat, which we used to heat water, to create pressure to turn turbines to generate electrical energy.
There's a lot of talk about creating fusion generators, whose advantages are that neither the original product nor the end products are radioactive, and the process itself releases broad EM spectrum radiation but not a lot of dangerous particles, relatively speaking. But no one is talking about making fusion glow globes to light our cities. We're talking about creating controlled fusion reactions to heat water to make pressure to turn turbines to generate electricity.
The only example of direct use of nuclear power that comes to my mind is an episode of (Tom Baker) Doctor Who, in which miners on Pluto were provided with light and heat by means of fusion satellites--fusion reactors which converted hydrogen into helium and in the process released sunlight in quantities sufficient to warm and illumine the planet. That's about as direct a use of nuclear energy as I've found.
And as noted, fission reactors were a necessary step in the development of an atomic bomb, so they were built first. But the controlled use of nuclear energy is a lot more difficult than the uncontrolled release of it.
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All that aside, there's no particular reason why someone couldn't have developed nuclear-based fission reactors to meet energy needs. I think that absent the nuclear arms race, though, early fission systems would have faced the same problems that present solar systems face: they were not cost efficient, and only became cost efficient because we needed to improve breeder reactors to provide the materials for the bombs. You might have to come up with some other impetus--like the oil shortage hit a lot sooner, perhaps if North American and Middle Eastern oil fields were never discovered (or simply didn't exist).
--M. J. Young
Another impetus might be concern for the environment. Reasonable enviromentalists would be for what is called 'nuclear power' by the vast majority of people (by which they mean steam generated from heat) as coal plants produce more radiation and lots of other junk than a nice, clean nuke plant.
The problem is though that when the coal plant explodes, it doesn't wipe out half the state in the process.
In Revelations, it talks about a comet called Wormwood which will poison 1/3 of the earth's water. The remains of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant are sitting right on top of three underground rivers. The Ukrainian word for Wormwood is Chornobyl. Only one letter off. Scary if you think about it.
I think the nuke power plant industy in America has an accident record of zero fatalities or something like that. As to Russia, well, it was Communists. Socialists are not that good at protecting the environment.
Also, I don't think it works like that with exploding half the state.
And as to Wormwood, I have to admit, that is interesting.
Yeah, I always said that was how we should have dealt with Saddam Hussein. Make a friendship offering of plans to a nuke plant. Just don't tell him they're the plans to Chernobyl.
Chernobyl was a combination of poor shielding, an emergency shutdown design that temporarily increased the reaction rate, and the operators deciding to turn off all the failsafes to see what would happen. Also, it actually didn't kill very many people, except for the reactor crew and cleanup crew members.
i'm pretty sure the US just has that record for non-worker fatilties. However, US reactors are a lot safer than the early USSR reactors, though reportedly not as safe as Canadian reactors, which require heavy water as the neutron moderator. US light-water reactors can use normal water, meaning that the coolent can sustain the reaction.
Strictly speaking, fission reactors don't use radioactive decay. They rely on a chain-reaction, just like bombs. Some power systems use only radioactive decay; they're called radioisotope generators. They don't produce much power, but they don't need refueling. NASA uses them on some of the probes.
Does that mean they're perpetual motion machines?
I'm sure he means it won't need refueling for a very, very long time. Perpetual motion means it never stops. Stopping a million years from now doesn't count.
The problem is though that when the coal plant explodes, it doesn't wipe out half the state in the process.
Nuclear plants do not explode, even in a worst-case disaster. What they do is melt down--they overheat and the fissionable material inside starts melting everything else, starting with the control systems. Worst case is called the China Syndrome, in which the material melts through the floor and into the earth below. Of course, it can't actually melt its way through the earth, and it will spread and cool long before it gets through the mantle; but it will contaminate groundwater in a fairly large area.
And John's got it right on perpetual motion: there's a lot of energy in radioactive decay, but it does run out eventually.
--M. J. Young