Hydrogen bomb vs Atomic Bomb vs Shuttle

[natto fire]

Kudos to the good people here, I know you didn't sign up for a remedial science class for yotube posters, but you answered the call anyways!

 

[norseamd]

wondering if i should make a thread for fusion power

given the advancements in the last 5 years there might be a lot to talk about

 

[sdifox]

wondering if i should make a thread for fusion power

given the advancements in the last 5 years there might be a lot to talk about

has been beaten to death here

 

[uclaLabrat]

No, water or O2 will naturally form because oxygen is an extremely negative charged element. It oxidizes everything that has valence electrons to share. It doesn't require much energy for that to happen. It doesn't require much energy to separate hydrogen and oxygen either. In a pot of boiling water, some of the molecules are becoming steam and vaporizing off, but the heat energy is excited electrons that allows the oxygen and hydrogen bonds to break and reform rapidly. That's what heat in a volume is, at least water, if I remember correctly.

I'm going to try to be as nice as possible and state that pretty much every declaration in this paragraph is wrong either in concept or technical application, at least as far as I understand it.

Water will form, generally, because it is the thermodynamic end product in a combustion reaction where hydrogen is present. Going the reverse direction requires additional energy input, generally in the form of electrolysis. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any reducing agents that convert water to hydrogen, though I'm sure some metal catalysts can do it.

Oxygen doesn't oxidize everything, just things that have a lower reduction potential than it. That happens to be a lot of things.

Hydrogen burning actually gives off quite a lot of energy, as the oxygen-hydrogen bond is quite strong.

Heat energy isn't excited electrons (that's light energy), it's excited molecules. Molecules rotate or vibrate faster, but their electronic transitions generally aren't effected by heat, again, as far as I understand it. I did really bad in Pchem.

The oxygen-hydrogen bonds aren't breaking and reforming at all during evaporation into steam. Water molecules are undergoing a physical state change, but no bonding changes take place (except for the standard self ionization of water)

 

[BladeVenom]

I'd recommend the OP, and evidently several other posters look up a free intro to chemistry book online. Or pick up a cheap one at a used book store.

 

[norseamd]

The oxygen-hydrogen bonds aren't breaking and reforming at all during evaporation into steam. Water molecules are undergoing a physical state change, but no bonding changes take place (except for the standard self ionization of water)

with my high school level of chemistry knowledge i could tell you that this is true

 

[uclaLabrat]

if you don't know much about a subject, before assuming that you are uniquely gifted in finding unorthodox but valid solutions to the ills of the world, become more knowledgeable about the subject.

not unless h20 simply happens to be nearby for some reason. even then, i have no idea if it just vaporizes (phase change, no chemical change) it or magically converts it back to h2 and o2. h2o isn't required or even wanted in a fusion reaction. (though we have done weapons testing of nukes underwater. they blow up in a sphere. who would have guessed. (the physicists. same with explosions in space.)

One of my favorite physics jokes: For the intents and purposes of this example, we will assume that the horse is actually a true sphere....

 

[Paratus]

One cool factoid.

If I remember correctly the Apollo 11 Saturn V released energy equivalent to 1/200 of the entire worlds energy use for 1969.

 

[Jeff7]

There are some liberties taken here in the interests of keeping this reasonably simple, just so you know...

Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't the space shuttle use liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen to blast off and create water(H20) as a by product?

The three main engines on the shuttle use hydrogen and oxygen from the large orange tank, and you get a lot of really hot water vapor coming out the back.
The two long white booster engines use solid fuel. Their exhaust is much more complex. I wrote a multipage report on that back in middle school....all I remember now is that there are lots of interesting chemical compounds used in those things. You might get a little bit of water vapor in there somewhere, but most of the combustion products are not nearly as clean.

We have "nuclear" reactors as a form of energy but why not "hydrogen" reactors as the hydrogen bomb was way more powerful than the nuclear bomb.

Fission reactors are used now. They use heavy atoms, uranium, and split them apart. That releases energy. That energy is used to heat water, which then turns turbines in a power plant.
Or in the case of a nuclear fission bomb, the energy is released in a small fraction of a second. This also produces a lot of heat and EM radiation, leaves you with a fireball of plasma and rapidly expanding superheated air around it: An explosion.

Doesn't the hydrogen bomb separate water and reduce it to hydrogen and oxygen?

No, it doesn't. Separating water into hydrogen and oxygen requires energy input.
A hydrogen bomb, as addressed earlier this thread, uses a fission bomb as the detonator, which then compresses the light hydrogen atoms together, hard, fusing them together. That is where the "hydrogen" and "fusion" part of the bomb's name come from. Very light elements release energy when fused together, and it's a lot of energy. So with a lot of hydrogen atoms fusing together very rapidly, you end up with a extremely powerful explosion.

Why don't we have hydrogen reactors?

I don't know much about the subject but I am interested in the energy produced by breaking the bond vs creating water . I may be wrong on the space shuttle, but I think it uses liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen to blast off producing a crap ton of energy and water. (thus clean energy)

Burning things releases chemical energy, not nuclear. Molecular bonds are created or broken in chemical reactions.

Yes, if you have pure hydrogen and pure oxygen, you'll get water if the two are burned.
But the first part of that is where you'll have a problem: Getting the pure hydrogen and pure oxygen. Sure oxygen is all over the place, but hydrogen is more difficult to get. There's not a lot of it in the atmosphere.

But, one way to get hydrogen (and oxygen) is electrolysis of water. But then you're putting energy into the water in order to break those chemical bonds.
If you're intending to then burn the hydrogen and oxygen, it'd be like charging a battery so that you can use that battery to charge itself again later. It just won't work out. If you use 500 units of energy to split the water into its individual components, the most energy you could ever get out of a combustion reaction of those components would be those same 500 units.

You could use the hydrogen in a fusion reactor though. In that case, you'd split the chemical bond in the water so that you could use the nuclear energy in the hydrogen atoms. It'd be like having a hand grenade inside a thin plastic wrapping. You tear open the wrapping in no time, and you've now got access to a lot of stored energy.

But you can't charge your tablet with a hand grenade.
Likewise, we don't currently know how to use hydrogen in fusion reactors, at least not for useful power production.
The Sun has no problem sustaining a stable fusion reaction in its core. It's also huge. (The Sun is by itself more than 99.8% of the mass of the entire Solar System.) Its balance of gravity and heat is what permits fusion to occur there. Gravity squishes the hydrogen together and fuses it together, aided by the incredibly high temperatures. Gravity also ensures that the superheated plasma doesn't expand and blow up like a huge bomb. It all balances out, and we're left with a reasonably stable star.

But on Earth, we don't have that kind of gravity available, and we need to make the hydrogen very hot in order to get the nuclei to fuse together. "Hot as the center of the Sun" hot. As you may imagine, that's not something that's easy to achieve.
(A form of helium may also be used for fusion reactors, since it is easier to get the nuclei to fuse together and release energy. That helium is very rare though.)


So there are numerous technical challenges that stand in the way of making fusion a stable power source and being able to extract power from it. We do have some experimental fusion reactors, but most of them require more energy to run them than they can produce, because it's so difficult and energy-intensive to start, sustain, and contain the reaction. A power plant that does not provide a net power output is not really all that useful. Just breaking even isn't good either. If you've got a complex $20 billion reactor that can only produce 50 watts in a day, the Sun will have burned out by the time that reactor would have paid for itself.

One of my favorite physics jokes: For the intents and purposes of this example, we will assume that the horse is actually a true sphere....

Yes.
"An engineer will call a cow a sphere if it makes the math easier."
Though I would think that a cube would make the math even easier. Damn curved surfaces always complicate things. Straight, flat sides, perpendicular to each other? Mmm.


"Assume you have a cubical frictionless horse in a complete vacuum, resting on a perfectly flat plane, in a perfectly uniform gravitational field."
or
"Assume this beam is perfectly rigid."


I also like the rounding method used in some of XKCD's "What If" writeups: Just round to the nearest order of magnitude. Depending on what you're working on, it's close enough.

 

[Chaotic42]

and as far as fusion reactors go, we haven't worked out the bugs yet. 40 years ago, the scientists said we'd have them in 40 years. the current scientists still say 40 years till viable fusion reactors.

True, but there's a reason:

 

[Jeff7]

True, but there's a reason:
</graph>

Damn, we sure are committed.

 

[SagaLore]

What we really need is some kind of machine that uses combustion as a means of converting a fuel source into rapidly expanding heat and converting that into kinetic energy. Maybe the fuel could be carbon based. That would be pretty cool.

 

[John Connor]

LOL

 

[SagaLore]

Damn, we sure are committed.

LOL at "actual funding" line.

 

[MongGrel]

That and it takes a lot of regulation.

Used to do some work on the space shuttle main engine controllers myself, those boosters need to be highly monitored in flight.

 

[WHAMPOM]

Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't the space shuttle use liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen to blast off and create water(H20) as a by product?

We have "nuclear" reactors as a form of energy but why not "hydrogen" reactors as the hydrogen bomb was way more powerful than the nuclear bomb. Doesn't the hydrogen bomb separate water and reduce it to hydrogen and oxygen? Why don't we have hydrogen reactors?

I don't know much about the subject but I am interested in the energy produced by breaking the bond vs creating water . I may be wrong on the space shuttle, but I think it uses liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen to blast off producing a crap ton of energy and water. (thus clean energy)

You are confusing atomic and chemical reactions.

 

[feralkid]

What we really need is some kind of machine that uses combustion as a means of converting a fuel source into rapidly expanding heat and converting that into kinetic energy. Maybe the fuel could be carbon based. That would be pretty cool.

I drove down to the Public Library to research your idea, but didn't see anything convincing.

Maybe I should take the bus to the University Library to see if anyone else has ever thought of this.

 

[Jeff7]

LOL at "actual funding" line.

Well come on, fossil fuel sources will continue to remain cheap and plentiful forever, right?
It's not as though they take a damn long time to replenish, or that Earth's size is not infinite.


Yes, it would have been nice if we'd had more of a push for fusion, or for the next-gen fission reactors. I was surprised to find out how terribly inefficient our current fission reactors are, leaving so much unused fuel in the waste. Some of those next-gen reactors would be incredibly efficient in that respect, and be intrinsically and passively safe, and help solve the problem of waste disposal by using existing waste as fuel. There'd still of course be some leftover, but the amount would be greatly reduced.

 

[John Connor]

I drove down to the Public Library to research your idea, but didn't see anything convincing.

Maybe I should take the bus to the University Library to see if anyone else has ever thought of this.

Don't expect much from Liberal academia.

 

[sdifox]

Don't expect much from Liberal academia.

That's right, y'all should visit the intelligent design museum.

 

[feralkid]

Don't expect much from Liberal academia.

Swing and a miss.




.

 

[norseamd]

Don't expect much from Liberal academia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation

use it

 

[BladeVenom]

Yes, it would have been nice if we'd had more of a push for fusion, or for the next-gen fission reactors. I was surprised to find out how terribly inefficient our current fission reactors are, leaving so much unused fuel in the waste. Some of those next-gen reactors would be incredibly efficient in that respect, and be intrinsically and passively safe, and help solve the problem of waste disposal by using existing waste as fuel. There'd still of course be some leftover, but the amount would be greatly reduced.

Yep, with just today's technology we could have safer more efficient nuclear plants. Instead due to politics we keep old outdated plants running past their designed life expectancy.

Environmental extremist who say the sky is falling due to CO2, refuse to allow CO2 free nuclear plants to be built.

 

[Jeff7]

Yep, with just today's technology were could have safer more efficient nuclear plants. Instead due to politics we keep old outdated plants running past their designed life expectancy.

Environmental extremist who say the sky is falling due to CO2, refuse to allow CO2 free nuclear plants to be built.

That's one of the big things I don't like. The designers said "Decommission this thing at this date, or bad things might happen."

Then bad things happen when the machines are kept running.

Therefore it's a bad design.




"Launch the shuttle!"

"But the people who designed it are saying that it's too cold outside, and that really bad things will happen if it's launched."

"Oh, they're just being engineers. Launch it. Public relations are more important than what some math nerds think."


*boom*


"Wow, that's a terrible design. Those people don't know what they're doing."

"Oh, you mean the ones who said that this exact thing would happen? Those people?"

 

[MongGrel]

That's one of the big things I don't like. The designers said "Decommission this thing at this date, or bad things might happen."

Then bad things happen when the machines are kept running.

Therefore it's a bad design.




"Launch the shuttle!"

"But the people who designed it are saying that it's too cold outside, and that really bad things will happen if it's launched."

"Oh, they're just being engineers. Launch it. Public relations are more important than what some math nerds think."


*boom*


"Wow, that's a terrible design. Those people don't know what they're doing."

"Oh, you mean the ones who said that this exact thing would happen? Those people?"

What he said.