Value of old Magnesium blocks just went up
 

MAGIC engine
http://www.mitsubishi.com/mpac/e/monitor/back/0608/green.html
http://www.mitsubishi.com/mpac/e/mon...ages/gd-p4.jpg

Sad, but it probably won't see the light of day in this country for another 30 years.

Just in time for the Europeans and Germans to have had it successfully implemented for the preceding 20 or so. That sounds about par for Detroit.

Is it really easier to store (powdered?) magnesium metal than say compressed hydrogen? The reason magnesium can be used as a fuel is that it is so volatile.

The recycled stuff in the loop is already a powder suspended in a solution of some sorts, right?

To start the process maybe a Mag stick will be ultrasonically pulverized or ground off.

A solution of what? Oil?

Now we are back where we started.

Also, anyone have a CRC handy to look up how much energy is released by say a kilo of Mg versus a kilo of H (taking all processes discussed above of course)?

Also, how are they storing the MgOH that obviously needs to be recycled?

Magnesium? volatile? Reacts violently with water? Nope. Maybe steam. Someone is leaving out some significant details.

http://www.webelements.com/webelements/elements/text/Mg/chem.html
Magnesium does not react with water to any significant extent. This is in contrast with calcium, immediately below magnesium in the periodic table, which does react slowly with cold water. Magnesium metal does however react with steam to give magnesium oxide (MgO) (or magnesium hydroxide, Mg(OH)2, with excess steam) and hydrogen gas (H2).


BTW magnesium is expensive and relatively rare.

well, since magnesium is so abundant on earth, even more then aluminium,
i doubt this new use for it will drive up the price of our antique 911 blocks...

metallic sodium has a nice reactivity to water.
don't be too close though.

I was waiting for that. Not being a scientist, even I know that producing enough of the material just to be burned up is not going to see wide spread use. All these people seem to forget the amount of energy it takes to make energy. What's going to power the mines?

I see solar, wind and water movement as the best 3 approaches, even if they are only used to refine petroleum. :D But, they certainly can shift some of the use of petro fuels away from electrical generation and the like. We can't build more dams because of the rivers and water life? I'll bet we could if we studied the issue a bit more. Why do we have to stop up the whole damn river? Can't we "waste" a little water?

It ain't gona be 30 years for the world to change. When gasoline hits $10 a gallon there is gona be a howl like you never heard before.

you been practicing that howl in yer basement Tabs?

So that 10ft high pile of 2.7 blocks in John Walkers workshop is worth its weight in gold, eh?

LOL, that howl will be me, howling all the way to the bank ;)

There are people who are working to tap the largest unspoiled energy source on the planet, the tides and currents of the oceans. If they can figure out an economic way to do that, it'll change the world. Until that happens nothing can touch nuclear energy for efficiency or cost on a large scale.

Yes, I said nuclear energy. I can hear the uniformed knee-jerk tree huggers running for the hills already.
Nothing we currently have can compete with nuclear energy when cost, supply, and pollution is factored in. It makes the most sense.
But what about the children? LOL

I wouldn't complain about more uses for nuclear energy...
At least then I could put my degree to use!
:)

And just think - we get more "depleted" uranium out of it too - more bullets and artillery shells to use against the next third-world country we want to invade!

Bonus!

Everybody wins!

A lot of that uranium is sourced from the desolute wasteland in the southwest.
Indian tribes happened to occupy those quite-undesireable lands because they were forced to relocate there (or die) centuries ago, so the US gub'ment quietly set up a violent mini-dictatorship to "represent the people". Read about "Dickie Wilson" and "Incident at Oglala".

Nuclear does have some environmental advantages, at least over combustables/fossil fuels, but not much. They've gotta figure a way to use every last drop of radiation energy from the source, and not toss the rods out at 70% (or whatever).

john... "close"
Sorry, being a nuke guy the "rods" are the control mechanism to make sure the "core" of the reactor doesn't go critical. The fuel or "enriched source" is what gets depleted from the reaction. This is the material that is depleted and later milled into Armor piercing rounds. And most "source material" is considered depleted at %65 yield.

Not busting you or anything, just making sure the semantics are correct.
Of course, all the beer right now doesn't help :)

so how do they get the depleted uranium to be non radio active?
i've understood that it's zero yield when it get's to rounds ( i hope so , cause i'de hate to see the recipients gather them up and use em for enrichement again)

and why isn't that method a solution for the radioactive waste?

but the military insists it's 100% safe and aparantly low enough in radioative radiation to be handled without any protective gear

which waste from a nuke plant, is not

That's what they told those poor bastards they put on those ships after a blast in the 1950's with no protective gear.

The exciting thing about the MAGIC engine is that it introduces competition to the market, the first time since the demise of the steam and electric motor cars.

Just watch oil prices drop like a brick striving to hedge it out of the market before it gains a foothold. No conspiracy theories, just open/free market greed at work.

Don't they have something called Fast Breed Reactors that depletes the uranium even more after the conventional nuclear process is though, rendering them useless for nuclear weapons?

I thought I heard something about that, some time, some where, but it might just be wishful thinking...Many944s/SammyG care to educate me on Fast Breed Reactors and how they play out with regards to nuclear energy?

Projections go up to a million people not counting the tens of thousands of birth defected miscarriages already reported.

Depleted uranium is mostly U238 (atomic weight, about 99.75% pure). it is very stable and not radioactive in pure form. (EDIT, pure U238 could emit alpha particles but not neutrons, so technically it is radioactive but not like the bad stuff). It is also the most common form of uranium in nature.
U235 is very radioactive and is what is used for power and things that go boom.
Nuclear generating stations use a mixture of U235 and U238.
The U238 is there to slow and control the reaction, kind of like a buffer. If they has pure or near pure U235 it would be too unstable and hard to control and not go boom.

A breeder reactor takes U238 and turns it into U235 or plutonium or whatever depnding on it's design and fuel.
I don't think they can take U235 and turn it into U238 (depleted) unless they have a lot of patience. The half life is measured in thousands of years.
I don't know of any type of reactor that can quickly decay the U235 into U238. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist, it just means I'm not aware of it.

What they have to do is refine the metal seperating the U238 from the U235. If they get the U238 pure enough it will have no radioactivity at all but it's really not possible to do that 100%. There's always a little tiny bit of radioactivity left but they can get it down to where it's lower than natural background radiation levels.

In Iran they are working to install hundreds or thousands of centrifuges.
They take the uranium and turn it into a gas, can't remember zackly what it is. Maybe uranium dioxide or something.
Then they run the gas through the centrifuges. The heavier gas (U238) is seperated from the lighter gas. It isn't very efficient so they have to centrifuge it a whole bunch of times. A really whole bunch.
Then after they have a high enough purity, they turn it back into a solid and can use it in a reactor. Or.... they can keep centrifuging it until the purity gets really high, and they can make things go boom.

Awrite,we jus' got inna discussion about energy from some idear about burning mag as fuel. I don't mind "nuclar" energy myself, but I hate it that they bury the waste. I wonder how much energy it would take to send the stuff on a slow rocket to the sun to be consumed in an instant.

People talk about dirtying up space, yet we dirty up our planet badly. There's a whole lot more "space" than planet. call me irresponsible, but I'd send stuff far away before anihalating the human race.

When my 2.7 bites the bullet, I am going to cut it up and use it to make those survival fire starters out of. The ones where you shave off a little magnesium and then have a flint to set it off....... Think I paid $10. for my last one, so I should have a life time supply sitting out in the carport......

The problem with sending it into space is the orbits that the trash takes on. There are concerns, even now, that with the amount of trash in space, satellites and other space-thingies will be hit.