Il riferimento del "bruciare le rocce" ("burning the rocks and the
sea") può per es. essere letto qui :
http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2008/02/how-fast-breeder-won-great-breeder.html
" About this time I wrote two essays on the role of the breeder...the
other essay [was] "Energy as an Ultimate Raw Material, or Burning the
Rocks and Burning the Sea," appeared in 1959 in Physics Today (vol. 12,
no. 11, p. 18). In this essay I speculated on the very long-range
future-hundreds, even thousands, of years in the future. Where will our
energy come from at that distant time when coal, oil, and natural gas
have been used up? Solar energy is one obvious inexhaustible source.
Another, if it works, could be controlled thermonuclear energy based on
deuterium from the sea (thus "Burning the Sea"). My main point,
however, was to stress what Phil Morrison and then Harrison Brown had
already noticed: that the residual and all but infinite uranium and
thorium in granite rocks could be burned with an energy yield larger
than the energy required to mine and refine the ore�"but only if
breeders, which could burn nearly all the fertile material, are used. I
spoke of "Burning the Rocks": the breeder, no less than controlled
fusion, is an inexhaustible energy system. Up till then we had thought
that breeders, burning 50% instead of 2% of the uranium, extended the
energy derivable from fission "only" 25-fold. But, because the breeder
uses its raw material so efficiently, one can afford to utilize much
more expensive�"that is, dilute�"ores, and these are practically
inexhaustible. The breeder indeed will allow humankind to "Burn the
Rocks" to achieve inexhaustible energy! "
Received on Fri Apr 01 2011 - 09:57:48 CEST