gardendance Who's read Rails Across the Galaxy by Andrew Offut and Richard Lyons?
Who's read Rails Across the Galaxy by Andrew Offut and Richard Lyons?
I haven't,but I'd like to..
I think all of our forum members need to take that money that they were going to invest in the Transatlantic tunnel and Alaska-to-Russia bridge and instead invest it in my new comapny which will build a faster-than-light "subway" to the stars:
http://www.bmo.physik.uni-muenchen.de/~mbaum/poster_sc/k.html
It may be a while until the stock pays a dividen but you are getting in on the "ground floor"(pun intended)..
And now; Back to Your Regularly Scheduled Program...
"I Often Dream of Trains"-From the Album of the Same Name by Robyn Hitchcock
Patrick Boylan
Free yacht rides, 27' sailboat, zip code 19114 Delaware River, get great Delair bridge photos from the river. Send me a private message
Semper Vaporo I was going to comment that this thread is supposed to be about Nuclear Fusion, and not Fiction, but then I decided they are probably synonyms in some respects.
I was going to comment that this thread is supposed to be about Nuclear Fusion, and not Fiction, but then I decided they are probably synonyms in some respects.
It was supposed to be about controlled fusion reactions, but many also make comments about nuclear fission as though the two were nearly synonymous.
C&NW, CA&E, MILW, CGW and IC fan
Semper Vaporo
Pkgs.
tomikawaTT Mass converter: a black box that takes in any kind of matter, solid, liquid or gaseous, and turns out electromagnetic, electrogravitic or magnetogravitic power as required by the item being powered. My favorite fuel, for demo purposes, is used kitty litter. (When pressed for a more detailed description, I usually provide one - of the Blonde Zamanian, The Green Dragon or Sexy Lexi. Blondes, brunettes and redheads are much more interesting than mysterious machinery.) In the Confederation Universe timeline, the first practical mass converters are scheduled to appear before the first human interstellar expedition late in the 21st century. However, it's probable that the design originated later and was brought back from some future time by someone with a J-drive starcraft. By the mid-35th century mass converter technology is mature, and ubiquitous on advanced planets. So, will they ever power trains rolling steel wheels on steel rails? I'd bet yes, but not on planets where groundskimmer use is widespread. The fixed route set by rail is too restrictive. Somewhat off topic, my 'up close and personal' contact with nukes involved holes in the ground, not holes in the water. The nukes themselves would have led to a different kind of, "Atoms for Peace," than the one General/President Eisenhower had in mind. "It's peaceful on Boot Hill..." possibly Louis L'Amour. Chuck (Occasional science fiction author)
Mass converter: a black box that takes in any kind of matter, solid, liquid or gaseous, and turns out electromagnetic, electrogravitic or magnetogravitic power as required by the item being powered. My favorite fuel, for demo purposes, is used kitty litter. (When pressed for a more detailed description, I usually provide one - of the Blonde Zamanian, The Green Dragon or Sexy Lexi. Blondes, brunettes and redheads are much more interesting than mysterious machinery.)
In the Confederation Universe timeline, the first practical mass converters are scheduled to appear before the first human interstellar expedition late in the 21st century. However, it's probable that the design originated later and was brought back from some future time by someone with a J-drive starcraft. By the mid-35th century mass converter technology is mature, and ubiquitous on advanced planets.
So, will they ever power trains rolling steel wheels on steel rails? I'd bet yes, but not on planets where groundskimmer use is widespread. The fixed route set by rail is too restrictive.
Somewhat off topic, my 'up close and personal' contact with nukes involved holes in the ground, not holes in the water. The nukes themselves would have led to a different kind of, "Atoms for Peace," than the one General/President Eisenhower had in mind.
"It's peaceful on Boot Hill..." possibly Louis L'Amour.
Chuck (Occasional science fiction author)
Obviously not Hard SF...still fun stuff.
You might enjoy this site:
http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/46411e9d02b29
It's run by a group of Sci fi devotees and science types who try to come up with some factual (though very speculative) basis for common SF tropes.
Still we are talking about making railroads obsolete...we should probably stop before the other forum members start throwing Brickbats (those things hurt when they hit!)..
Firelock76 But just how do you stoke a dilithium fueled locomotive?
But just how do you stoke a dilithium fueled locomotive?
I can't resist ... "VERY carefully'
As long as we're going "Sci-Fi" here how's about a locomotive fueled with dialithium crystals?
But just how do you stoke a dialithium fueled locomotive?
carnej1What do you mean by "Mass converter power"?
Not to paraphrase, but this is an old SF trope: a device accomplishing total conversion of mass to energy. By methods somewhat carefully unspecified if the author in question is wise ... but I usually delight in a good application of 'verisimilitudinous pseudophysics' -- the F in SF does mean 'fiction', after all.
[Don't start with the 'there's mass conversion in lots of reactions', or "come back, missing four ounces..." -- that's infinitesimally small compared to what a 'mass converter' would be doing]
tomikawaTT Will Davis Folks, take it from someone actually in the nuclear field. Fusion power is not something near at all, and there's no guarantee it ever will be. More importantly, a moving land based nuclear power plant locomotive will NEVER get licensed. NEVER. Not to contradict a working nuclear physicist, but what do you call all those U. S. Navy ships whose type designator ends in N? Seems to me that the Fleet has proved that mobile devices powered by reactors can be operated safely and efficiently. If the process is left in the hands of engineers and scientists, land-based mobile reactor-powered (or fusion, or mass converter powered) units WILL be developed, rigorously tested, certified safe and placed in commercial service. Never is a long time, and scientific development doesn't stand still. Of course, if control is yielded to journalism students and lawyers who can win popularity contests, we'll all be speaking Chinese before it happens. Chuck
Will Davis Folks, take it from someone actually in the nuclear field. Fusion power is not something near at all, and there's no guarantee it ever will be. More importantly, a moving land based nuclear power plant locomotive will NEVER get licensed. NEVER.
Not to contradict a working nuclear physicist, but what do you call all those U. S. Navy ships whose type designator ends in N?
Seems to me that the Fleet has proved that mobile devices powered by reactors can be operated safely and efficiently. If the process is left in the hands of engineers and scientists, land-based mobile reactor-powered (or fusion, or mass converter powered) units WILL be developed, rigorously tested, certified safe and placed in commercial service. Never is a long time, and scientific development doesn't stand still.
Of course, if control is yielded to journalism students and lawyers who can win popularity contests, we'll all be speaking Chinese before it happens.
Chuck
Victrola1 We have not run of coal. If fossil fuels remain readily available and cheaper, fusion may languish as a replacement.
We have not run of coal. If fossil fuels remain readily available and cheaper, fusion may languish as a replacement.
If (and its a big if) controlled nuclear fusion can be commercialized for power generation it will bury fossil fuels (pun intended) on a cost basis. That's why there has been so much R&D on the technology for the last 50 years.
Mr. Hungerford may not have been much of a prophet, but didn't he write beautifully?
You just don't see that kind of prose anymore. What a pity.
But isn't that the same Hungerford who would give us William Wiggins and the One Big Railroad of 1961 a bit later? ;-}
Seriously ... the answer to this, you all know. Dieselization with diesel-electrics was "good enough" without the massive stranded costs of the electrifications per se. (Imagine the fun involved in, say, electrifying that Lehigh Valley route to Wilkes-Barre and then having to watch the anthracite market shrivel up and die...). A far better project, extension of the electrification westward from Harrisburg with its roughly 9400' tunnel (IIRC) under Horse Shoe, and GG2s (and probably HH's) to run on it, was left undone by the combination of dieselization and falling-off of profit...
(In case anyone does not know, Hungerford was among the people who knew the most about his contemporary railroad world. He was -- as many such people turn out to be -- far less adroit as a prophet...)
In this great single super-economy the railroads of eastern New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, southern New England, and northern New Jersey may easily share. In fact it is definitely planned that they shall share in it. The list of feasible users of this concentrated power includes the Fitchburg division of the Boston and Maine, all the way from Boston to Rotterdam Junction, New York (oddly enough the western half of this division, from Greenfield to Rotterdam, through the Hoosac tunnel, 104 miles, has for some time since been marked for electrification by the road’s own engineers); the connecting Delaware and Hudson from Mechanicsville, New York, to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania; the New York, New Haven, and Hartford from the present terminal of the electric zone at New Haven through to Boston, both by the Shore line and the Springfield line (this predicates of course the electrical operation of the Boston and Albany all the way east[Pg 155] of Springfield—and why not west of that point also is not easily discovered); the main line of the Erie, from Jersey City to Susquehanna, Pennsylvania; the Lackawanna, from Hoboken to Elmira; the Lehigh Valley from New York to Wilkes-Barre; the Central Railroad of New Jersey-Reading-Baltimore and Ohio group to Washington, to Hagerstown, Maryland, and to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania; the Pennsylvania, from New York to a point just beyond Harrisburg—all of these main lines and a host of their branches. Such is the railroad portion of this embracing scheme. The only important road in its territory that is omitted from the electric program is the New York Central, which has such low grades and hence such economical use of power that the economy of electricity is least necessary to it. If ever it should desire to coöperate in the plan, it probably can gain the power for its main line—west of Albany, at least—from Niagara Falls, and for its network of busy lines in northern New York from the abundant water-powers of the Adirondack preserve or the huge St. Lawrence River international power project.
This all seems most logical. In the case of New England it so happens that the super-power plan—which is now seemingly certain of eventual execution—embraces just that section of the territory where there is the least surplus of water-power. The rough, wild rivers of the north of Maine, of New Hampshire, and of Vermont can and yet will operate almost all of the mileage of the railroads of those States; the distant mines in the Pennsylvania and the West Virginia hills will run the lines in the rest of New England. Power—power to move railroads—will cease to move across the most congested strip of North Atlantic seaboard in noisy and overcrowded and inefficient car-loads of coal. Power will come on the copper wire and will move the silent trains around Boston, New York, and Philadelphia—and many of them—some of them with big and efficient locomotives and others by sturdy small individual motors set within the car-trucks. The steam [Pg 156]locomotive in this northeastern territory is nearly doomed. I think that eventually it will be doomed everywhere within the United States (our disappearing coal supply will be the chief factor in this), but first and foremost of all in the great congested areas which, having no coal of their own, live in constant and deadly fear that an overworked and overgrown railroad structure may yet fail to bring to them all that they need for their imminent necessities.
Our Railroads To-Morrow
By Edward Hungerford
Copyright 1922, by the Century Company, New York
Gomez would be happy.
Pardon me if these observations have been mentioned earlier in the thread.
A relative of mine was a career electrical/chemical/mechanical engineer at General Electric. The kind of guy where GE had to hire three people to replace him when he retired. He died about 10 years ago.
One thing he told me was that there would not be a civilian nuclear power industry without the military. Not economically feasible on its own. (And civilian nuclear power generation made a nuclear military politically palatable).
Also, he became ecstatic when fusion was finally achieved for an instant. He said that having achieved that, it'd only be a matter of time until usable fusion would be accomplished.
Have fun with your trains
I am thinking that having small nuclear generaotor and stringing up wire in remote stratigic high capasity corridors would be a better choice.
Will, my apologies. I thought you were an ivory-tower academic. I didn't realize you were a hands-in-the-machinery type.
The seagoing boilers I had hands-on experience with burned oil. Of course, the only nuke boat in commission at the time was SSN-571.
I think you should go back and re-read what I actually wrote. I work with a LONG time scale. Who knows now what will be developed in a few decades or centuries? I agree that right now the technology to use E=mC2 devices to power a locomotive isn't even a smoke puff on the horizon. That doesn't mean that it will NEVER happen. While people are doing insignificant things with multi-billion dollar devices some entity well below the radar might just tinker a way to convert cat litter to clean energy with insignificant heat, no detectable radiation and zero emissions. When? Good question. (Holdeth not thy breath!)
Chuck [MSgt(Ret), USAF, occasional science fiction author]
Folks, I've said this before and I'll say it again. When a US Navy nuclear fleet veteran tells you something about nuclear propulsion you'd better believe him, or her, for that matter.
Take it from an old Marine, the toughest school in the US armed forces is Navy nuke school. Tougher than flight school, tougher than SEAL school, tougher than anything you can imagine. Make it through nuke school and you're something special. It's the reason the Navys safety record with nuclear propulsion is second to none. And don't try to be smart by mentioning the "Thresher" and the "Scorpion", the loss of those boats had nothing to do with the "kettles" back in the en-gyne spaces.
Just my two cents. Semper Fi Mister Davis, and "keep a level bubble"!
Chuck,
I actually was qualified Reactor Operator on two different US Navy submarine nuclear power plants. So actually yeah, I've heard of those. Nice snarky reply but that really is just that - snark, without fact.
Somebody here want to tell me what power cycle this fusion plant will work on? Anyone? Heat transfer medium? Anyone? Practical experience with your given power cycle?
We already "did" this with fission. And for all the talk that foamers (yes, nuclear energy has foamers too, and they know less than railfan foamers) make about nuclear planes, trains and cars, there really was almost no investment made on trains at all in comparison to that made on conventional nuclear plants for commercial power and for military uses. (Or commercial ships powered by nuclear energy.) It never really was "just around the corner." Not even close. Not one single prototype design for nuclear locomotives was ever submitted to, and accepted by, the AEC for analysis and licensing.
None... NONE of the things you have available for military shipboard nuclear power is available to railroads. NOTHING. You have no nationally funded nuclear laboratories to design plants, no prototype sites, no decades-long training program, no maintenance support, nothing. All of that investment would need to be made to get any sort of chance of having any system in any way comparable to the Navy's (and remember, that comparison was made by the previous poster I'm replying to.) Nuclear plants at sea also have something you would not have on land as a nuclear locomotive moves around - billions of gallons of available water. Think about that.
The plain fact of the matter is that there's zero chance of getting any sort of railborne nuclear power unit licensed by the NRC. Folks can like that, not like it, believe it or not believe it but that's just the way it is. Heck, we are right now in the midst of preparing for tsunamis at US nuclear plants that will never see one. (Deliberate oversimplification, yes, but point made.) Can you imagine trying to prove safety on a nuclear locomotive, given the railroads' record of derailment, collision and accident with diesel and electric trains? If you must have nuclear powered trains, then do what France did - build magnificent, load following nuclear plants that contribute well over half the nation's power and electrify the railroads. Much else is just fantasy.
Railroad Locomotives - My Blog
This post is about experimental fusion-generated power. AFAIK, you are mostly referring to fission.
A couple of things... Ships have more room to put shielding, with the surrounding sea water acting as part of the final shielding itself. The surrounding sea water is also useful in the case of an accident, as it can be used to flood the reactor compartment to keep the core coverd with water (TMI and Fukushima both became real messes when their respective cores went dry).
Note to Schlimm below - the surrounding sea water would be even more of a benefit for shielding a fusion reactor than a fission reactor. Of course decay heat wouldn't be as much of an issue for a fusion reactor as for a fission reactor, though the components of the fusion reactor would be intensely radioactive.
Will DavisFolks, take it from someone actually in the nuclear field. Fusion power is not something near at all, and there's no guarantee it ever will be. More importantly, a moving land based nuclear power plant locomotive will NEVER get licensed. NEVER.
Uncontrolled nuclear fusion could make the whole planet blow up and turn into the sun and or create a mini black hole that will eventualy get bigger and suck everything into it. This is of course after the New World Order will have downloaded there consciusness into a mainframe computer satilite and blasted off into space
Borst called his locomotive X-12. It seems Oak Ridge was X-10. I guess Brookhaven was his X-11. Here's his obituary in The Chicago Maroon, student newspaper of the University of Chicago, Aug. 16, 2002:
Physicist Borst dies at 89, by Whet Moser
Alumnus Lyle Borst, a former member of the Manhattan Project and the founder of the Federation of Atomic Scientists, died July 30 at the age of 89.
Borst, a Chicago native, completed his undergraduate education and his master’s at the University of Illinois, and earned his Ph.D at the University of Chicago in 1941. One year later, Borst worked in a metallurgy lab at the University under Enrico Fermi. The experience Borst gained in helping to create the first sustained nuclear reaction led to his being named supervisor of research for the creation of the X-10, the world’s second nuclear reactor, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which was completed in 1943.
His quick rise to the heights of American physics continued when, at the age of 33, he was hired to direct the construction of a nuclear reactor at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York. At the time it was the country’s most powerful reactor and the first intended only for research. Only nine months after it reached critical mass, the Brookhaven reactor began to produce a type of radioactive iodide that would become vital to the treatment of thyroid cancer. Soon after his departure from the lab in 1951 for the University of Utah, Borst used his research at Brookhaven to show that beryllium 7, an isotope of beryllium not found naturally but created at Brookhaven, is fused in the collapse that marks supernovas.
The creation of the reactor at Brookhaven established Borst as a physicist with a passion for the responsible use of nuclear energy. In 1945, at the end of World War II, Borst founded the Federation of Atomic Scientists, for the purpose of maintaining nuclear energy and research under civilian control. The Washington, D.C.-based organization expanded to become an important think tank now called the Federation of American Scientists, involved in all aspects of the use of nuclear energy.
After his work in Utah, where he directed construction of the school’s reactor, Borst moved on to New York University and the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he taught for 19 years. At NYU, Borst was responsible for the development of the “Pickle Barrel,” the first reactor built for the purpose of instructing undergraduate and graduate students.
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