Do It Yourself Heavy Water Reactor
DoItYourself HeavyWaterReactor
Do It Yourself Heavy Water Reactor
Project
Synopsis
Introduction
I started this project several years after I had won a nice 'chunk of
change' in the local government lottery. Of course I first paid off
all the bills, car, house etc.., then with the remaining have fun with
cash I pondered on what do use it for. Then the Idea came to me,
since I had always been interested in nuclear power I decided that I
would build a home made nuclear reactor. The question then became how
could this be done.
In doing some research I came across the CANDU reactor. This seemed
to be the simplest type to build once you striped out all the nice to
haves. Reduced to its simplest form it was just a pool of heavy
water into which non enriched uranium pellets were put.
Of course there were only two problems. Where does one get heavy
water and where does one get uranium.
The Build Site
First off nobody's spouse is going to let you do this at the family
home. So you must look for a small property, preferably out of town,
that has both highway and power access. If you are lucky it should
also have a large garage or barn so you have some place to set up your
heavy water centrifuges.
In addition you will have to have or to dig a basement. This is where
you will have the reactor room. Putting it below grade will protect
the surrounding area from stray radiation.
Heavy Water
This is by far the hardest part to get. It is considered a munition so
you can not just go and and buy some without all kinds of legal
documentation and permits. It is much easier just to extract your own
heavy water from tap water.
All the water in the world contains light water H20, heavy water D20
and very heavy water T20. No most of the water is light water and
very heavy water is so rare as to be non existent for our purposes but
heavy water is fairly common. So common in fact that the average human
contains about 2 table spoons of heavy water.
The thing we need to know is that in every 5 liters of tap water there
is 1 cc (cubic centimeter) of heavy water. Now heavy water is 17%
heavier that light water. In fact an ice cube made of heavy water
will not float in light water. We then use this fact in order to
extract the heavy water from the tap water.
Now although heavy water is heavier than light water it is not heavy
enough to settle to the bottom of a container. However, it is heavy
enough so that a centrifuge separate it out from the light water. It
just takes a long time.
The system we developed will produce about 8 CC of heavy water per
week per centrifuge. Which of course will only give you 416 CC in a
year. That means that in order to get any meaningful amount of heavy
water you will need to build a bank of them. This of course will run
up your electricity bill but it is cheaper than trying to do chemical
separation the way that they do in the industrial heavy water plants.
For our project we build 12 centrifuges and over a two year period got
just over 5 liters of 75% proof heavy water by weight.
For use in our reactor this was then diluted to 50% D20 giving us 7.5
liters of heavy water.
Uranium
The uranium was a bit more difficult to acquire. Again like the heavy
water it is a restricted item so you cannot just go an and buy some.
However, being as it is an naturally occurring element it is 'easy' to
come across.
In my case I happened to live near to an area that has currently
working uranium mines with ore qualities of 2 to 4%. All I did was to
get a Geiger counter and spend several weekends over a period of two
years while the heavy water was being acquired and walked the river
banks and rail lines picking up bits of ore here and there. I also gt
in some really great fishing.
In the end I ended up with about 1250 lbs of the ore. My next problem
was to find a way to process this ore. After a little research I
extracted the uranium from the ore in the same way that gold
prospectors extract their gold samples from their ore.
Most of the equipment required, the crushers, heaters etc, were
readily available off of Ebay.. Some where pricy, for example the
crushers were about $1200 each. I got two.
Although it did take some time to process I did end up with about 1
kilo gram of 'refined' uranium. This I remelted down and created ten
100gm ingots.
The Reactor Room
My reactor room was a hollow concrete block that has two heavy wire
handles at the top. It was large enough to contain the reactor and
two small articulated robot arms. The robots can be got off of Ebay.
The block had no top and was filled with more concrete at the end of
the project making a solid block..
The Reactor
I considered two types of reactor. A pool reactor and a Pressurized
Water Reactor.
The pool reactor was just as the name em plies a pool of heavy water
into which you put uranium. The heavy water functions as a moderator
and the reactions start. It is very simple but does not really allow
you to do much and the drawback is that the heavy water as it heats up
will evaporate. Which because is took so long to actually extract the
heavy water was not really susceptible for what I wanted to do. That
left the Pressurized Water Reactor.
Now since a preassigned water reactor is a somewhat dangerous thing to
build I designed a compromised solution. A sealed pool reactor that
was cooled by a set of radiators. This of course required a couple of
safety systems. Primarily non interrupter power for the pumps and a
method to dump the heavy water quickly out of the reactor should the
reaction start to run away.
Disposal
At the end of my test period the reactor was drained on its heavy
water to stop the reaction. Then I encased the entire reactor and
irradiated equipment by filling the reactor room with concrete.
Since the walls were already there with the crane hooks in place once
the new concrete hardened it was ready to be moved.
Then I had the concrete block hoisted onto a flatbed truck and driven
to a local jetty where it was placed on a tug I had hired. IT was
then taken out to sea and dumped. I made sure to dump it well off
shore so that it would not come to rest on the continental shelf but
sink into the deep ocean.
I estimate that it actually came to rest at about 12,000 feet down.
