I want to build my own Mini Nuclear Power Plant in my garden

Just use the giant nuclear power plant in the sky.

Harvest fire alarms.

>>7707747
Is americium actually useful for anything like this?

>>7707737
Reported and hidden.

>>7707737
I've heard of dumber plans, though not that many.

>>7707755
lolwut

>>7707737
You have to start by growing some uranium from the correct seed, talk to your dealer if he has some

>>7707747
and you only need a few million of them to achieve criticality
but if you want sufficient power you need more
and control rods or burnable poisons for additional reactivity insertion unless you just want it to provide power for a very short amount of time

>>7708375
in germany there must be some uranmetal from the nazis burryed near some town never found again only a old picture wich got later cencored with houses in the background

>>7708381
Can Americium even become critical?

>>7709150
yeah

>>7707737
just get a diesel generator

>>7707747
David Hahn, pls go

>>7707751
No, its why it was used in commercial buildings.

They are also being phased out for cheaper/better photoelectric sensors.

>>7709150
Its not going to be fantastic, but yes it can.

op is a faggot, but how viable would a mini coal plant be?

Can't you just buy uranium?

>>7711158
The isotope 242m1Am (half-life 141 years) has the largest cross sections for absorption of thermal neutrons (5,700 barns),[86] that results in a small critical mass for a sustained nuclear chain reaction. The critical mass for a bare 242m1Am sphere is about 9–14 kg (the uncertainty results from insufficient knowledge of its material properties). It can be lowered to 3–5 kg with a metal reflector and should become even smaller with a water reflector.[87] Such small critical mass is favorable for portable nuclear weapons, but those based on 242m1Am are not known yet, probably because of its scarcity and high price. The critical masses of two other readily available isotopes, 241Am and 243Am, are relatively high – 57.6 to 75.6 kg for 241Am and 209 kg for 243Am.[88] Scarcity and high price yet hinder application of americium as a nuclear fuel in nuclear reactors.[89]

There are proposals of very compact 10-kW high-flux reactors using as little as 20 grams of 242m1Am. Such low-power reactors would be relatively safe to use as neutron sources for radiation therapy in hospitals.

Burn the weed as a power source

Inhale the exhaust

2 birds with 1 stone

Actually, an RTG battery would be optimal for small growth.

Obtain some Pu-238. Wrap it in lots of peltier cells (PC tuning supplies!) with some radiators, maybe even watercooling if you want to be fancy. There, done. Should be good for some 30 years.

>>7712107
No, unless you got some serious connections and credentials.

But you can harvest it from sea water with tannins and a nice chemical distillation kit, a nicer home brew beer kits work well. You can get tannins from many places, including the bark of an oak tree. It takes a lot of tree bark so it helps if you buy specific types of mulch as cutting it off trees takes a lot of time and effort.

Then enrich the uranium with parts from an office grade laser printer. The newer ones have better optics but some of the older ones the have higher energies you want. I ended up using parts from three different printers before I got it working right.

Ended up just paying a machine shop to make me the final separation chamber as I do not have easy access to the metal working tools I needed. Make sure you include a replaceable target surface, it makes it much easier to collect the samples after they are enriched. Over all it is not that hard as you are only adapting existing nuclear knowledge you can find at most university libraries, rather then inventing it yourself.

Just be careful with how you handle the hazardous waste. County inspectors throw fits over trace amounts heavy metal, even when it is isolated to your property in a safe manner. Thankfully they do not test for radiation, though they really should.

>>7707737
Start by never talking about your plans to do this ever. Too late now NRC vans on route.

Just leach off of your neighbor's power like they do in Africa.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FalQQTo6Xho

>>7712107
Not really buy, but you can possess it depending on what material, how much, and how pure.
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/cfr/part040/part040-0013.html

>Mine and or buy uranium
>Pretty easy to identify
>mine enough to put into a gas centrifuge
>lol gas centrifuge, imagine that.
>get the enrichment up to 3% uranium 235 for what you have
>put it in your reactor

ez.
Now about those gas centrifuges...

>>7712335
>>7712370
I'm not from the US, random third world country withy zero regulations. Can't you just order uranium ore sample kits from literally amazon or something?

I've been always toying with the idea of making a KW scale nuclear reactor in my basement, only trouble I could get in the radiation itself. I've been thinking of even trying a thorium reactor based on 50s design, but I'm too poor for the parts. Sadly, my knowledge is also lacking in the area of nuclear engineering.

>>7712649
>KW scale nuclear reactor in my basement
our uni has a 1 KW reactor but it uses 19.5% enriched uranium and is still about 2ft by 2ft
but you have to have some type of control mechanisms and if you actually want to generate long term electrical power, some extra reactivity built into the system, which can be dangerous considering you dont know how to load the reactor and determine at which point it will reach criticality to prevent it from going prompt critical.

>>7712665
I'm aware I'm a total retard regarding all that, that's why I haven't yet won the Darwin award.
>tfw there is nothing stopping you from making a nuclear reactor but your own brain and a couple thousand dollars

>>7712141
A TEC cooler would require more energy to dissipate the heat than it would generate.
>Take energy from RTG
>Use heat dissipated from it to boil water
>Steam reactor

>>7712690
How many KW are we talking about? Passive cooling requires no energy, you know.

>>7712695
Peltier coolers aren't passive, anon.
New Horizons RTG made 300W of electricity and 4.4kW of heat.

>>7712683
and the US govt when they find the person using massive amounts of power running enrichment centerfuges

>>7707737
Don't you think building a nuclear power plant will bring on unwanted attention to your grow OP?

>>7712940
Look up the Radioactive Boy Scout. It is for real. And yes, last time the US gov did not notice anything wrong until his home built reactor set off Geiger counters screaming one block away.

Last I heard he had radiation scars. Mind you, the US gov did have a crazy sense of humour considering where they gave him a job.

>>7707747
i dont think there have been enough fire alarms produced ever to gather enough material. youd need literally over 100 billion at initial source strength

>>7715022
Not true at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_mass

>>7716651
theres only .25 micrograms of am-241 in a smoke detector brand new
crit mass for bare sphere is like 50-60 kg unreflected

>>7714308
I have the book right on my desk; you know his plant never made any power, right?

>>7712107
most certainly, off DNM.

>>7712683
It's cute you think it's so easy, must be nice

Justin Kasper and Fred Niell did something similar in four days for a scavenger hunt
THE scavenger hunt, really: University of Chicago SCAV

I repeat: they did it in FOUR DAYS
it didn't produce power though; it was a breeder reactor, sort of.

>>7712397

If you use heavy water like the kunuks you can use natural uranium instead of enriched.

>>7716690

> you know his plant never made any power, right?

You gotta really fuck up the definition of power to come to that conclusion, it certainly produced energy.

>>7716859
We all know what kind of power op is talking about; he even said it. Don't be a silly nilly for the sake of technicality.

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>>7711116

You dirty bastard, you beat me to it.

Good job, though.

You know, nobody has any idea where that crazy fucker went. Like, the only human being in history to build his own private breeder reactor gets busted stealing smoke alarms and then just vanishes. Maybe he's under a bridge in the Pacific Northwest doing bumps of bathtub crank. Maybe he ended up some mangled John Doe while hopping freight.

Maybe, just maybe, he scraped up enough cash to travel to Russia and there he is to this day... creeping through the reactor compartments of mothballed Soviet nuke subs with a flashlight clamped in loosening teeth and a maniacal giggle constantly slipping around it.

Sleep tight.

>>7717108
His tumors killed him.

>>7717142

Obit?

>>7716817
You are delusional if you think it isn't possible. The main limitation is that we have no fucking idea how to do it. For all we know, in 150 years a gigawatt thorium or even a fusion reactor could be made or mass produced for under $10,000. It's an engineering issue that will be resolved eventually.

>>7717386
no. you cant even get feedwater pumps for a plant that big for 10K, let alone pressure vessels, steam generators, etc.

>>7717100
>power
Superhero powers, right?

The power would be heat and you could scale it up, depending on how much radiation you want to endure. If growing weed is the main issue then life expectancy is less a concern and in any case you could get your "customers" to take another fuel pellet into the core.

Power could be extracted using alpha or beta voltaics, and secondary extraction using semiconductors as in radio isotope generators or even Stirling motors. Waste heat could be used to heat your farm, depending on local climate.

I just wouldn't recommend any of it.

>>7715022
>literally
Kill yourself

>>7717966
>implying facts are not literal

>>7712649
>literally amazon
Kill youself

>>7717969
>implying it needs to be stated that a fact is literal
Kill yourself

>>7717951
Anon, please. OP said "I grow a lot of weed and I need a lot of electricity for that." which clearly implies he wants his nuclear power plant to contribute a significant portion of the energy it produces in the form of electricity. The radioactive boyscout never got any electricity out of his so I'm going to have to say that the idea is impractical and won't lead to any beneficial results. I don't disagree at all that it is producing energy, but just not the right kind for OP.

>>7714308
>>7717108
Wasn't there another teen who did this same thing but wasn't a complete fuckup? He actually got somewhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiago_David_Olson

>>7707737
ayy lmao

>>7707737
Allahuackbar
jk, I suggest solar panels instead friend

Order solar panels, battery and converter and draw energy from the sun........

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>>7707755

Get off 4chan you pussy

>>7712141
>Obtain some Pu-238
>Should be able to find some at 7-Eleven
>Hear that Walmart is now selling them
>Hurry before they're all gone

>>7712698
>New Horizons RTG made 300W of electricity and 4.4kW of heat

Soviet RTG's (powering lighthouses) had the same amount of wattage for nearly 15 to 20 years.

Now Siberia is littered with useless nuclear generators filled with dangerous radioisotopes. Which brings up the question, what will you do with yours when it no longer produces enough energy to sustain your weed farm?

>>7717108
>the only human being in history to build his own private breeder reactor
It wasn't a breeder reactor, though. It was just a neutron source next to some crushed thoriated mantles and uranium ore.

A breeder reactor is a critical fission reactor which produces more fissile material than it consumes.

What Hahn did wasn't a significant or unique technical achievement (neutron sources are reasonably common lab equipment, and have been made by many private hobbyists), just remarkably irresponsible behavior.

The regulatory response was a bit silly, though. What he made wasn't significantly more radioactive than what he started with (he'd get far fewer neutrons than he'd get radium decays, and he had negligible neutron multiplication, so he was producing fewer radioisotope atoms than were decaying from his source material). He was just a dumb kid playing with more radium than he should have been able to get his hands on, because he found it in an antique. That antique clock's paint supply was the real concern.

>>7719253
>Wasn't there another teen who did this same thing but wasn't a complete fuckup?
Olson made a fusor (a fusion-based neutron source -- only a little harder to make than a fluorescent lightbulb), not a radioisotope neutron source.

He didn't sneak around, lie to people to get information, smurf his acquisitions, and hide what he was doing.