A conversation on SpaceBattles made me think some more about an idea I had...
Picking up his phone as it buzzed and answering it without looking away from the complicated design he was working on, still concentrating on it, Colin said, "Armsmaster."
"Hello, Armsmaster," a familiar deep female voice said pleasantly. "I had a question that I thought you'd know the answer to immediately and save me wasting time looking it up online. Plus I trust your information more anyway."
He smiled slightly. "Go ahead," he replied, pleased at the comment, but still mostly concentrating on his work. With his other hand he used the haptic interface he'd added recently to move a tiny component in the model on screen, then reran the simulation to check that it worked correctly.
"Am I right in believing that polonium 210 has no critical mass?"
Absently nodding, he said, "Correct. It is an extremely vigorous alpha emitter and produces approximately one hundred and forty watts per gram of heat as a result, but there's no point where bulk polonium 210 would form a critical mass as it doesn't emit neutrons. Aside from the extreme toxicity to biological systems and the rarity, it's a good choice for thermal RTG units."
"That's what I thought. Thanks. Talk later." She sounded cheerful as she hung up. He did the same, putting his phone down again and getting back to work.
About ten minutes later, his brow furrowed.
He glanced at his phone.
"Oh, hell," he muttered, hastily saving his work and then getting up, putting his armor on then almost running to his bike in the garage.
Ten minutes after that he was zooming through the city streets towards BBFO and the DWU.
"Hello, Armsmaster," the gate guard smiled, opening the barrier for him. "Are you looking for Mr Hebert today, or someone from the Family?"
"The latter," he said quickly, revving his bike and moving off.
"Raptaur is down by the shore!" the guard yelled after him.
Rumbling across the large open yard, Colin suddenly heard a rising whine, which spooled rapidly up in both pitch and volume, to stabilize at an earsplitting screech, coming from somewhere behind the BBFO building. Most of the people in the yard turned to look in that direction, pointing at the cloud of steam that was now roaring out across the bay.
"Jesus," he muttered to himself, unable to suppress the comment. Following the sound while engaging the sonic dampers in his helmet which reduced it to merely loud, he parked the bike to the side of the row of buildings and cautiously peered around the side. Raptaur and Panacea, along with Leet and Über, were standing next to a large machine that squatted on the edge of the dock, a wide pipe going down into the water below it. The thing was about the size of a small truck, but longer and thinner. The end that was sticking out over the water was spewing transparent vapor that he recognized as superheated steam at an appalling rate, the gaseous water condensing into a huge white cloud nearly a hundred feet past the output end.
Leet appeared to be monitoring the operation of the device with a laptop set up on a folding table twenty feet from the machine, the others looking over his shoulder. All of them other than Raptaur were wearing hearing protection of a type Colin didn't recognize. The Tinker pointed at the screen, shouting something he couldn't make out. Raptaur nodded, then moved to a large array of enormous floodlights that were connected to the machine with heavy cables, large knife switches on each one. She threw one of the switches, which resulted in an eye-piercingly bright light as one bank of lamps came on. Colin estimated that this was at least a hundred kilowatts of load, based on the size of the bulbs and the sheer number of them.
The machine's scream changed tone slightly, becoming more throaty. Leet waved a hand and the huge lizard engaged the second switch, then the third and fourth ones as he repeated the action. Each extra light bank made the machine's sound alter further.
Fascinated, Colin walked over, stopping a few feet back and inspecting both the machine, which he could see appeared to basically be a multi-stage steam turbine of unfamiliar design connected to a large generator, also not a commercial version. Under this was what had to be a large pump. In the middle was an oval bulge, which was obviously where the steam was being generated, but it was much too small for anything that was burning a normal fuel.
He could see that it was pumping seawater out of the bay, boiling it at a furious rate and generating enormous quantities of incredibly hot steam which was being used to generate the electricity running the lamps, presumably being used to load the generator down for testing. By now there were a dozen banks lit up brightly, the radiance and heat painful even a hundred feet away with them pointing in the other direction. The reflections from the concrete were brighter than the sunlight. Raptaur seemed unaffected by the heat and was now wearing similar sunglasses to those her sister routinely wore.
Looking at the screen he could see that the graphs the Tinker was studying showed a power output of well over a megawatt. His eyes widened at the displayed exhaust temperature. It was far past the point that normal alloys would lose a significant amount of strength, even most superalloys. The rotational speed was horrific as well.
A few seconds later, Leet waved again. Raptaur nodded, going back down the row of switches and flipping them all off, before heading to the machine and putting her hand on the side of the bulge. A second later the deafening screech of high pressure supersonic steam began to rapidly diminish in volume, while the turbine whine spooled down from nearly ultrasonic through the range to silence.
The abrupt lack of noise was profound. Disengaging the sonic dampers, Colin sighed heavily, then walked over to join the group who were all smiling. Raptaur looked at him and grinned.
"What did you do this time?" he asked, having a very good idea.
"Made a generator," she replied happily. "It should be good for about four or five megawatts with a full fuel capsule. We need to add the condensers, running it open loop like that is much too noisy and dangerous, and it'll need some proper power control stuff on the output, but all that is easy, Leet says. This was just to prove the concept was sound."
"And the source of the heat?"
"One of these," she smiled, holding out her hand on which a two foot long by six inch diameter EDM cylinder appeared. The heat coming from it made everyone instantly retreat fifty feet or so, except Panacea who just grinned through her faceplate, her suit insulated enough that it didn't cause her any problems.
"It's full of polonium 210, isn't it?" he groaned.
"Yep. About a hundred pounds of it. I think it's probably a vapor at this point, actually." She studied the cylinder she was holding, then poked the concrete with the end of it. The result was it slowly sank into the molten glass that was produced. "It's pretty hot."
Somehow not surprised that she was holding in her bare hand something that his visor was reading as being well past the melting point of tungsten, he shook his head in despair. "You do realize how incredibly toxic polonium is, I hope?"
"Of course. But it's not going to get out of here." She waved the horrifically dangerous thing at him, then made it go away. It probably had contained more polonium than all other world wide sources of it put together, he reflected with resignation.
"It goes into the middle of an array of tubes made of EDM inside the boiler," she explained, waving at the machine. "That gives it a hell of a big surface area. The end result is that it seems to boil the water really fast." Scratching her chin reflectively, she added, "And the salt in the water as well, apparently. Anyway, it doesn't seem to have clogged up. We should probably use distilled water for the next version but we wanted to see what would happen. I was just a little worried about critical masses and Leet couldn't remember exactly."
"I'm not entirely sure that a polonium-fueled reactor is a wildly good idea," he began carefully. "There are… some possible safety concerns."
All four of them looked at him. "Which are?" Leet asked curiously as he walked over. "EDM isn't ever going to break, that capsule could contain a decent sized nuclear blast without damage. The turbine and bearings are made of it as well, so the maximum speed the thing can turn at is essentially unlimited. I can't see any problems."
"Bit loud," Panacea noted.
"A proper condenser will deal with that," the Tinker said, waving the problem away. "Plus some acoustic insulation. The thermal efficiency is good, the electrical efficiency of the new generator design is excellent… The only problem is that it will need refueling every year or so to maintain a decent output."
"We could just oversize it and put a lot more polonium in it, a ton or so, that would still produce several megawatts for nearly a decade," Raptaur commented.
Colin felt a little faint.
Leet nodded thoughtfully.
"Possibly. Pity plutonium 238 is so much less effective, the half-life is over eighty years rather than a hundred and thirty days or so. But that's the problem, the faster you get the energy out, the shorter period you can get it out for."
"Plus there's that whole critical mass, everything goes bang problem," Über said.
"Yeah, you could only put a small amount in safely and it wouldn't produce more than a few kilowatts," his friend agreed.
"Unless we deliberately make it go pop, then soak the heat up into something like a storage heater does?" Raptaur said slowly. "Then we could pump water through it for ages and get the heat back."
Colin felt extremely worried at this point.
"On second thought, perhaps the polonium concept is worth considering further," he hastily said. "It would be less complex to engineer than a pulse detonation heat engine using fission explosives."
Leet looked at him, then Raptaur. Both of them nodded.
"I guess that's a good point," the latter replied. After a moment she frowned. "I suppose you'd probably think that antimatter is also a bit much? Only I was reading this science fiction story and it gave me some ideas..."
When he finally got back to his lab, Colin carefully locked the door, then took his helmet off, wiping the sweat dripping from his head on a paper towel. Collapsing into his chair he moaned.
"Oh, god, why me."
After a long time, he shakily reached for the mouse and clicked on the icon that put a call through to Dragon.
He needed to talk to someone sane before his head imploded.
When he found out who had suggested to Raptaur that she should come up with a method of powering the DWU facility, he was going to hurt them…