Nuclear engineer reporting in. Fellow engineers respond!

>>7947408
Are you undergrad, grad, or practicing Nuc Engineer? Genuinely curious what kind of work you guys do

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Current NukeE undergrad here
>We're so underrepresented ;-;

>>7947408

Is cold fusion a popsci meme or will it happen?

>>7947519
op here. It's a meme. We should not focus and dump that much of money to it, rather work on actually doable projects, like the thorium cycle. Though as I see it, any amount of money that is put into nuclear research worth every penny. We should just relocate it to things that we could actually demonstrate already way back in the 60's.

>>7947408
Considering you are posting on /sci/ rather than /g/ you might want to tell a little about what new exciting development you see coming up.

For instance about alternative use for waste materials. Anything going on with alpha og beta voltaics? Way back then I read about use of magnetic fields to separate alpha and beta radiation and use these for electricity generation, handy when you want a source to operate for a few thousand years. Nothing heard of that since.

>>7947474
graduated, attending masters now. Most of the guys work at institutes, nuclear power plants or companies that deliver to npps.
Nuclear engineering in general involves particle physics (reactor theory) computations (monte carlo mostly), thermodynamics, thermal hydraulics even dosimetry, so it's kinda wide.

what the hell do Nuke Engineers do for jobs, aren't most positions taken up by mechanical/chemical engineers

>>7947408
i hope your lawn is big enough for helicopter to land

>>7947541
4th generation is coming. China just installed two HTR-PM reactor vessels and continue building the pilot plants which would power a 200 MW turbine. These reactors are modular which I think is key to the next generation of cheap power production. Paradigm shift is on the way, no matter how hard greens are against anything that could actually lower CO2 emissions. (Sidenote: greens are the most retarded people this planet has ever seen).
I've never heard of this kind of power generation you described although I do understand and yes it seems possible, but really hard to achieve. Look up Pu-238. It decays with hard alpha particles ~4.5Mev if I'm right that generates enough heat to power a small space craft. Since Pu-238's half life is 80 years, you can design a probe that lasts for the given time or so. (The current generating is explained by the Seebeck or Peltier effect.)

>>7947543
Chew bubble gum and kick ass.

>>7947543
Suck on penises, like most engineers, except they don't do it professionally.

Man your work looks boring as hell

>>7947408
>Nuclear engineer reporting in
where at? fellow nuke (student) interviewing for Lockheed Martin next week

>>7947574
But I'm all out of bubble gum :(

>>7947408
Is understanding quantum mechanics that important in your curriculum?
This question isn't meant to be like "my physics dick is bigger than yours". I'm genuinely interested.
I took a quantum mechanics class and found it so tedious, with the quantum model of hydrogen, probability density of a particles momentum, and blahblah. The whole time I was wondering if people really needed to understand that kind of junk to do cool stuff like nuclear energy.

>>7948693
Particle physics is a big chunk of it. Without it, you can't really comprehend the mechanics behind fusion/fission.

>>7949700
>>7948693
The physics of nuclear reactors doesn't have much to do with quantum physics or fundamental understanding of what's going on in

Rather, it's all about a simplified probabilistic model of hard little point masses shooting in straight lines through a sea of obstacles that cause different sorts of events when they encounter them.

If a neutron can bounce off a nucleus, be absorbed by it without fission, or interact with it to cause fission, then even though the nucleus is one object, the potential for these events is treated as three separate little balls the neutron might bonk into.

Of course, the only thing that matters about these balls to a flying point mass is their maximum cross-sectional area, so reactor physics is all about "cross-sections".

For practical purposes, cross sections for different reactions, by particles flying at different energies, through different materials, at different temperatures, are determined almost entirely by empirical means, by doing experiments to measure them, rather than predicted by theoretical analysis of the case of one particle meeting another using what we know about the strong force and EM.

>>7947408
Do you think Gen 4 reactors are going to change the way people look at nuclear power?

Also, what are some accredited sources to read up on the dangers of fission? I feel like a big part of it is fear mongering by people who don't understand the mechanisms.

>>7949851
Interesting. It sounds like nuclear physics uses the hard sphere as a model for an atom.

>>7949931
As I said, the atom's modelled more like a collection of hard spheres. Anyway, this is nuclear reactor physics, just a pragmatic little corner of nuclear physics, which can get much more theoretical, be far more concerned with the truth of what's going on, and also be a hell of a lot less accurate and harder to test.

>>7947494
Are you familiar with a Dr. Danaray Nilsson? She left RPI this year to teach at my uni, and she was just fired for incompetence last week. The cunt fucking destroyed my GPA.

>>7947408
I'm a stationary engineer, that's basically the same.

>>7947408
Minecraft engineer, reporting in, sir!

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>>7950599
forgot pic, sir!

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>>7950581
>stationary engineer

Dude, I love your work. Did you make those different colors of stick-its for book marks? Brilliant!

>>7947570
You are actually using the thermoelectric effect to generate usable electricity in high amounts?
Could you elaborate a bit or point me to some sources like papers?

>>7950605
>faggot doesn't know the difference between stationary and stationery

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>>7950602
That's impressive!

Food engineer, reporting in!

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Railroad Engineer reporting for duty.

>>7947408
i don't know how you guys understand nuclear fission. it makes absolutely no sense to me.

>>7951612
hot rock make steam. not complicated anon.

>>7951612
What part of it don't you understand?

The heaviest completely stable nucleus is lead (though bismuth is almost completely stable). Below that, isotopes are only unstable when they have a bad balance of protons and neutrons. Above that, they're unstable just for being too big, always on the edge of flying apart from their internal repulsive forces. Think of it like a little water drop that is wracked with storms and turbulence, bulging and bouncing and not quite coming apart.

The attractive strong force, which hold nuclei together, is very strong, but falls off abruptly at very short range. The electromagnetic force (mostly repulsive in nuclei) is also very strong at those ranges, but falls off less slowly. Protons repel protons and neutrons repel neutrons, but protons and neutrons attract. When an unstable nucleus splits, the parts are thrown away from each other at relativistic speed, with the attractive strong force failing off abruptly, but the repulsive electromagnetic force pushing them very strongly over some distance.

The fission fragments tend to have both a bad balance of protons and neutrons, and are excited with some of the energy that accelerated them, so they fall apart into smaller pieces in both slow and quick ways. Neutrons released by fission mostly escape from fission fragments, very quickly, before the fragments are slowed down by collision with other things.

Neutrons are not strongly repelled with long-ranged electromagnetic force by complete nuclei, so they can easily enter them and make them more overweight and unstable, or make the balance of protons and neutrons bad.

>>7951687
Easy to explain qualitatively. The physics makes absolutely no sense to me. I think I just suck at nuclear physics

>>7951700
>The physics makes absolutely no sense to me.
With the cross-sections? Seems like a pretty straightforward way of modelling a situation with a bunch of neutrons flying around with random probabilities of reacting in different ways when they run into nuclei.

Like, you just have trouble with doing the actual math?

Or do you mean the quantum chromodynamics. Because that doesn't make a lot of sense to anyone.

Civil engineering student here. Pls no bully

accounting student report in

>>7951208
If this were any other board I'd say this was sarcasm.

electrical engineer and I love dick

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>>7947408
Hey nuke engineers, what are your thoughts on liquid salt reactors? The future or the latest meme?

>>7947543
can this get a real answer? Im genuinely curious.

Elec, but you guys need to stop having a god damn circlejerk over your majors.