Notice the steam generator, the turbine, and the battery?
Posted on 04/28/2018 4:52:10 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Is Bitcoin a greed-driven fad or will the blockchain technology that underlies it revolutionize the internet? Will artificial intelligence produce a world of ease and plenty or turn on us and kill us all? Is that jet pack you always wanted arriving any day now, or basically never?
There are no shortage of people who make their livings by claiming to have answers to these questions. You should probably meet their claims with a healthy dose of skepticism.
Futurists aren't all snake oil salesmen, of course, and it's sensible for both individuals and businesses to think ahead and develop contingency plans for possible future scenarios. But history also offers plenty of reasons to be skeptical of "experts" with crystal balls.
In the past, a great many of them have often been outrageously wrong.
You may have heard the infamous 1977 quote by Digital Equipment Corp. president Ken Olson -- "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home" -- but as a highly entertaining recent roundup of failed tech predictions by blog Relatively Interesting illustrates, Olson's flub was just the tip of a very large iceberg.
Here's a small sampling of the sometimes hilarious quotes that made the list. I can't guarantee the historical accuracy of all of them (many quotes have incredibly murky origins), but I can promise they'll remind you that confidence is no guarantee of actual competence when it comes to predictions of the future of tech.
"There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will." -- Albert Einstein, 1932.
No, we do not. Nuclear reactors, on land and on shops, are used only to generate heat to boil water. The shed electrons from the radioactive materials are NOT harnessed to directly create electricity. We only use the heat from the chemical reaction between the materials.
We take 2 radioactive materials, put them in close proximity to create intense heat,
And just what is it that creates the intense heat? Nuclear fission, which IS effectively the "shattering" of an atom. The problem may have been that AE was of the belief at the time that a stable, controlled nuclear chain reaction may not have been attainable. It wasn't until 1942 that Fermi et al were able to create the first controlled, self sustaining nuclear chain reaction.
Remember, Einstein was a physicist, and given the law of conservation of energy, probably wouldn't have cared about the conversion from heat released by fission, to steam, to electricity.
Mark
Notice the steam generator, the turbine, and the battery?
My uncle won awards for the team that sold OS/2 to China. He also managed IBM PC manufacturing. He still lives well in Boca.
Nuclear reactors are used at nuclear power plants for electricity generation and in propulsion of ships. Heat from nuclear fission is passed to a working fluid (water or gas), which in turn runs through steam turbines. These either drive a ship's propellers or turn electrical generators' shafts.--wiki
Yes, fission creates heat. But we aren't harnessing the electrons from the fission reaction to create electricity... we harness the heat from the reaction to boil water to turn a turbine to create electricity. There's a major difference. Yes, by technicality only, we are using fission as a step in the process... but that isn't the same thing as directly taking the massive power of the atom and putting it directly onto the grid, and that is what I believe that Einstein was talking about when he posited the possibilities of Nuclear Energy.
See 46.
You’ve got all kinds of things hopelessly confused.
Well, you should take credit for being half right anyway - it is garbage.
No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
Bookmark.
So....people who invested in the Radio Telephone Company. Did they get rich, or did they lose their money?
...
From what I can find, it was a bust.
However they did sell some of their inventions to AT&T which would have been a great investment in the early 1900’s.
“The world potential market for copying machines is 5,000 at most.” — IBM, to the eventual founders of Xerox, 1959.
...
They screwed up on the PC, too.
The heat comes from splitting nuclear bonds. Part of the energy is turned into heat, part into other types of radiation. The result of the fission is lots of fission products like various cesium isotopes.
You are very misinformed.
What you are thinking of perhaps is the kind of power generators on spacecraft which use decay heat as a power source.
Umm, you posted yourself the Wiki entry to notes that HEAT from the Nuclear Fission Is passed through a liquid which turns the steam turbines. Exactly what are you not understanding about that? The Energy from Matter is NOT being harnessed. The energy from nuclear bonds are NOT being harnessed. The electrons from the reaction are NOT being harnessed. ONLY the heat is harnessed.
Again, sorry but I have to disagree with you.
In nuclear reactors (and all radioactive elements,) neutrons, not electrons, are released due to atomic decay. When certain, other elements are struck by neutrons, they may absorb the neutrons (for instance, U235 can become U238, which is less stable, and becomes a more fissile materiel,) and when struct by neutrons, the nucleus breaks, forming other elements, in some cases "lighter," like Strontium, or heavier, like Plutonium. In either case, the fission of a heavy atom causes an exothermic reaction, which releases great amounts of electromagnetic radiation, which includes heat.
Again, I have to believe that, as a physicist, Einstein wouldn't have made a distinction of the type of energy released. And again, in the 1930s, it was widely believed that a nuclear chain reaction would be uncontrollable.
And not to place too find a point on it, the distinction you're making is akin to saying that we don't get electricity from coal or other fossil fuels. When they're burned, they generate heat, which is converted either to steam or mechanical energy, which then spin turbines, or in your car, the mechanical energy is created by the reciprocating pistons acting on the crankshaft, which by a belt, turns an alternator, generating electricity.
Mark
Yes but a physicist in the 1920s talking about Nuclear Energy is talking about utilizing the ENERGY directly from the atomic bonds themselves, not using the HEAT from the reactions to boil water. We do not do that.
I always chuckle at the film of Steve Ballmer being shown the first iPhone. He shoves it away with his hand saying “no one wants that”!
[Meaning a mini-computer that is also a phone].
One of my first jobs in my initial stint as a postdoc was to look at some of these other industrial uses of reactor-supplied heat and radiation. Some are familiar to the public, such as desalinization of seawater. Others are more exotic, such as neutron-induced doping of semiconductor materials.
Mark
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.