Barometric energy generator

This is just a crazy concept for renewable energy that i came across, I'm not saying that it will work, I'm saying it could work.

Basically, this is a scheme of sorts to generate energy by abusing the pressure differences on this planet. What we need is a decently deep body of water and a gas medium preferably denser than water. A flexible "bag" of gas is dropped from a factory down a pipeline into the depths, where the gas becomes pressurized. A simple mechanism at the bottom of the lake transfers the gas from the flexible container to a rigid one. The rigid container is large and takes several bags to fill, once it becomes filled to capacity with pressurized air, it is brought up to a surface generation plant where the pressurized gas is either packaged and sold or used to power gas turbines for power.

Solar Farming

Ever since the use of fossil fuels raised enough worries to begin a quest for a renewable energy source, sunlight has been one of the most sought after methods of power generation. From this quest to harness the sun mankind has created inefficient, but workable solar cells that convert light into electricity, along with monterous fusion reactors in an attempt to make our own "sun in a bottle". Despite these inventions, I'd say that without a significant breakthrough in either of these alternatives, we wont be able to power anything other than individual households even if they are implicated into our power grids en mass.

Fusion reactors are promising, so I wont shoot that idea down, but why did we go through all the hassle of creating chemical substances that react with light to give off electrical energy when a much more complex but very well engineered natural substance does pretty much the same?

Chlorophyll in plants convert sunlight into ATP and then from that, glucose. Its been around since the dawn of life on the planet, and, creation or evolution, it works at an efficiency much higher than machines. The only reason that we haven't been able to use it for fuel purposes is that the plant does not see the need to excrete fuel, only to grow and reproduce. Of the energy generated by a plant, a massive amount goes into growing its supporting structures, extracting nutrients from the soil and manufacturing chemicals used to reproduce, only a small amount by comparison is turned into stored sugar, which is of interest to us. What should be done is to engineer a simple plant cell that will at first take nutrients from its surrounding and divide for a set amount of cycles, then begin to grow massive amounts of chlorophyll and store large amounts of sugar, at a chemical que, the stored sugar is released into its surroundings, which would later be collected.

An outdoor pool given sufficient nutrients and a sterile environment could easily house millions of such cells. Given if one cell could produce but one gram of sugar per day, the energy yield of such a pool will be much larger than if it was covered with conventional solar cells, artificially engineered enzymes and chemical cycles could be implanted onto the cells and speed up production, the whole process is very skin to a nuclear one in the sense that the energy created by one reaction is very little, but the number of reactions make the total substantial.

U238 (depleted uranium) reactor

Depleted Uranium, its heavy, its hard to dispose of, it makes good armor piercing shells, and we have piles of it sitting around from nuclear reactors and mines waiting to be processed. Despite us having so much of the stuff, the fact that it is unsuitable for use as weapons grade fissile material resultes in research into its potential limited to it being incorperated into anti-tank rounds, and the fact that this stuff has the potential to power a reactor seems to have slipped the scientific community until now.
A reactor burning depleted uranium cannot produce any weapons grade material, we can just build one and shove it over to Iran and say "look, this stuff burns cheaper fuel, gives more power, has almost no risk of a catastropic meltdown no matter how incompetent your operators are, and is way better in every respect except that you cant make a bomb with it. If your nuclear intentions are peaceful, replace your reactors with this."
As for the reactor design itself, there is already one being looked into called a traveling wave reactor which will use enriched uranium to start a self sustaining reaction in a field of depleted uranium using neutrons released from the enriched reaction to enrich/destabalize the surrounding depleted uranium in order to keep the reaction going. Once fueled, such a reactor could run for decades before the entire field of depleted uranium is brunt, and its output will only increase unless checked for the "burning front" will increase in legnth as the reaction spreads. Despite the increased output, the fuel starts out unsutable for weapons and never actually gets close to a critical mass except when the reaction is first started, so although the risks of a meltdown are there if some idiot turned off the cooling system, the chances of the reactor turning into a bomb are slight.
Another design I was going to propose was slightly more complex and involves a series of faceleted and interconnected chamebers lined with depleted uranium, one central chanber will have a small neutron fuse like the ones used in bombs, but neutrons from the fuse will not be focused onto one point like in bombs but released to bounce along the chamber whose geometrical design allows the escape of neutrons into a similar neighboring chamber. The neutrons arnt actually "bouncing", rather, they are exciting and causing fissile reactions whenever they hit the sides of a chamber, causing more neutrons to be released.

Apocalypse Now

Human beings gained the ability to extinguish life on this planet a long time ago when we entered the atomic age, and yet why has no one built a shelter which would be safe from the world should the world decide to end itself?
Nuclear warheads are in a sense rather overrated, they can level any and all man made structures, but they are still nothing compared to nature's hard shell. To build a self sustaining sanctuary would be a simple although burdensome task, one simply has to find a stable and deep mine such as a depleted gold vein some miles underground, reinforce the cavern to keep it from collapsing and to keep moisture from entering, install a small nuclear reactor, which will run for centuries on only a few tonnes of fuel, and bring in a small population.
Water needed to sustain life can quickly be farmed by digging a cavern below the water table and not insulating it against moisture, water found by this method would already have been filtered by the earth and would at least not be salt water. In the case of a nuclear war contaminating all the water with nuclear radiation, simply use electricity from the aforementioned nuclear reactor to break down the water into component hydrogen and oxygen, redirect the gas to a sterile chamber, and allow water to re-condense free of most radiation.
Food could easily be farmed with artificially generated light and water from the above method, such a sanctuary would be virtually invulnerable to any disaster on the surface.

Clean Bomb

The nuclear bomb, although a powerful weapon, is frowned upon both by tacticians and politicians for its unwanted side effects. From a completely strategic point of view, a nuke makes for a poor offensive weapon. While its primary can and will flatten any man-made target, the affected area is unsuitable for occupation. The only good strategic use of a nuke is to use it as a fail-safe. Say that your forces defending a key position such as a bridge or port is hopelessly outnumbered and enemy troops are already moving in to occupy the position, your best choice of options includes a unscheduled sunrise a few kilometers over that port, flattening out the remaniants of your forces and the bulk of the enemy, while making the key position unusable.

But to make such a dirty device something suitable for offensive operations is rather easy. Most of the radioactive fallout comes from unreacted primary stage fissile material (uranium or plutonium). Most fission bombs (a-bombs) only have one stage where the conventional explosives crush a fissile stage, and much of the fissile fuel is unreacted and created fallout. In fusion bombs (h-bombs), the energy from a fission bomb is harvested to crush and heat hydrogen to the fusion temperature, which in turn reacts more of the fissile material, creating less fallout.

What I propose is to create a three stage fission bomb using four layers of conventional explosives and three layers of fission fuel. Stage one is located at the center of the bomb and consists of a thin shell of fission material sandwiched by a conventional core and outer shell, its detonation occurs first.The second stage is located at the outside of the device, and the layout is similar to the first stage, consisting of a thin shell of fissile fuel sandwiched between two shells of conventional explosives. The final stage is simply a thick shell of fissile fuel.

What happens when the timer goes off is the first and second stage detonates, creating two nuclear scale explosions to either side of the final stage, crushing it with more force and duration than any conventional explosive, reducing fallout without reducing yield. The leftover fissile material from the first stage also has no where else to go other than to the hot little reaction occurring at its neighboring third stage, and the crumbs leftover are given a second chance to fizz, reducing fallout yet again while probably increasing the yield.

Containment

A few days ago I found myself looking at the mess which Japan has created for the world to clean up, and I approached the broken containment vessels and runaway fission reactions just like any other problem. But after a few days of thought and moderate research I will now say with reasonable confidence that at this point, all we can do is cut our losses.

There is no way that any uranium or plutonium (the latter of the two is not even supposed to be in the reactors in the first place) that was released into the environment can be cleaned up, and there is also no way of stopping the leakage of additional radiation.

Why? What you are trying to do in cleaning up radiation is to find every individual granule of uranium out in the environment, a task which at best is comparable to sorting out a handful of sugar spread out in a beach full of sand. Stopping the leakage is also impossible due to the same issue, there is no way to stop something as small as individual molecules from escaping such a large area.

So what should we do? Well, nothing is certainly not the answer, and nothing is what the Japanese seems to be doing.

If we want to be humane, I would say to open a chute into the now broken containment vessels, and dump tons and tons of sand mixed with cadmium and graphite shavings. Not only do you provide a heat sink, you also absorb neutron radiation from decaying fuel, slowing down the rate of decay and preventing the reactor from turning into a nuke.

But if we want to be practical, find some patriot ready to die for country and ask the poor chap to go in, grab the fuel rods, encase the molten pile of radioactive shit in concrete and dump the mess into the ocean.

Thermite Reactor

So earlier on I designed a weapon that incorporates thermite, and mom's not too happy about my destructive nature. So here is a reactor that generates lots of power with the same concept, the power from which can be used to power cities or weapons to defend/destroy cities, that outta make the world a little happier...

It is a grim fact that we are running out of fossil fuels, big deal. As long as there is demand for power, we can always switch to something even more powerful and damaging to the environment, as long as its cheap...
The core of the earth is made almost entirely out of iron and about 35% of earth's mass is entirely iron, so no risk of iron, the metal which burns in thermite reactions, from running out. The other ingredient for a termite reaction is alumnium, which is 8.1% of the earth's crust, and so we also have plenty of that ingredient. Although it is expensive to extract and purify, for something as crude as a burning reaction we dont need it to even resembol a metal.
Instead of burning fossil fuels or using nuclear fuel to heat a vat of water, sustain a thermite reaction in the center of the coolant vat (water) by accelerating chunks of iron rust and aluminum into an already started thermite reaction, creating a little thermite "sun" in a vat of coolant(water). Thermite burns at like 3,000 C, and its also self-oxidizing, so the water wont snuff it out, it will absorb heat with more effiency than other reactors. By skipping the contaminated to uncontaminated coolant stage in nuclear reactiors, and the metal container keeping the water from the fire in conventional generators, power is transferred with almost 100% efficiency from heat source to water, because the heat source is in the water. Water exposed to 3,000 degrees will obviously vaporize into steam, and that will be directed up a tower through a bunch of gas based turbines, and instead of going directly back down, it will be collected in an condensing tank at the top of the tower. Condensed water will drop down through the tower, powering yet another set of fluid based turbines on their way back down to the reaction chamber, only to be vaporized again there and set off on another ride through both sets of turbines and so on and so on. On the way up, some steam is siphoned off to push powdered fuels into the chamber. Any solid reactor waste is collected in a fine mesh net below the reaction in the water, and removed and replaced remotely without stopping the reactor.
The only problem I can find while writing this thing is that to mine the fuels needed will actually require more energy than the energy generated, seeing as how purifying iron(not really, seeing as how we want iron trioxide, which is common iron rust) and aluminum(which is really hard) are challenges in and of themselves. But this problem is softened seeing as how we don't need the fuels 100% pure, just like coal. The bad stuff that wont burn will bet caught up in the mesh nets and filters, so there are problems, but they can be solved.

River Resupply

Apparently nature cannot keep up with the rate of mankind's natural abuses, so on several occasions, mankind has had to help nature with mankind's abuses. The main problem that I will now address is the fact that our rivers are losing their freshwater sources, and should they dry out, which they will, it will be much harder to bring freshwater into cities that used to have the river as its water supply. So I propose, that at the base of a dying river, we place a giant water treatment plant whose sole purpose is to convert the water in the river into hydrogen and oxygen by means of electric current. The hydrogen gas released will have a naturally high potential energy, due to its light weight. The hydrogen will be fed along a pipeline at the bed of the river back up the river floating from a lower elevation to a slightly higher one. Once the gasses reach the top, they will be burned in a large and extremely tough container such as a natural cave, and the resulting water fed back into the river. To cover expenses, pure water can be diverted and sold and the river dammed to produce both revenue for upkeep and electricity for hydrogen generation.