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[Putnam]

20 billion, so much, w0w.

That's like... a new fighter jet! Well, part of one, at least!

$138 million for an F-22. The program cost was $62 billion.

It's worth about a fifth its weight in gold, though.

[Descan]

Okay, so I was exaggerating -a little-.

Either way, ITER is only a third the cost of developing/deploying (right? That's what you mean by program, ya?) a new fighter jet, and no one bats an eye at that. Clean, abundant, and super-fucking-cool energy is worth at least a third of new shooty-shoots, yes.

[miauw62]

And BTW, breeder reactors have other problems than physical ones, they can in theory be used to create weapons-grade materials.

[10ebbor10]

Well, not only in theory. The point of a breeder reactor is to create fissile plutonium that can then be used in a MOX like combination to power other reactors.

Most often however, it won't be pure enough to be weapons grade.

[Helgoland]

And BTW, breeder reactors have other problems than physical ones, they can in theory be used to create weapons-grade materials.

Why's that a problem, though?

[Gentlefish]

Because oh no we might use it to blow ourselves up and not, you know, recycle it for high-quality energy.

[10ebbor10]

A nuclear weapon is more complicated than ajust some weapongrade material.

Additionally, the proliferation danger is smaller than enrichment tech. If you centralize the breeder technology, or use selfsustaining breeders, proliferation risk isnt bigger than it is now

[TheDarkStar]

Plutonium doesn't have as much of a proliferation danger as uranium, since you can't really handle plutonium easily. On the other hand, uranium can be handled with your bare hands for the 235 and 238 isotopes, but breeder reactors don't separate the uranium types. Not that it would be good if someone stole plutonium, but it would be very difficult and dangerous.

[Loud Whispers]

Because oh no we might use it to blow ourselves up and not, you know, recycle it for high-quality energy.

Why not both?

[MaximumZero]

Because oh no we might use it to blow ourselves up and not, you know, recycle it for high-quality energy.

Why not both?

Blowing ourselves up is stupid?

[Loud Whispers]

Because oh no we might use it to blow ourselves up and not, you know, recycle it for high-quality energy.

Why not both?

Blowing ourselves up is stupid?

I was referring to potentially blowing up alongside copious volumes of energy as opposed to simply blowing up and releasing all that energy.

[kaian-a-coel]

I'm just going to post this here and then proceed to the happy thread:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.1283v1

TL;DR:
We calculate the Casimir energy-momentum tensor induced in a scalar field by a long-throated traversable wormhole, and examine whether this exotic matter is sufficient to stabilise the wormhole itself. [...] Provided the throat radius is above some fixed length, the renormalised Casimir energy-density has sufficient magnitude to stabilise a long-throated wormhole far larger than the Planck scale, at least in principle. Unfortunately, the renormalised Casimir energy-density is zero for null rays directed exactly parallel to the throat, and this shortfall prevents us from stabilising the ultrastatic spherically-symmetric wormhole considered here. Nonetheless, the negative Casimir energy does allow the wormhole to collapse extremely slowly, its lifetime growing without bound as the throat-length is increased. We find that the throat closes slowly enough that its central region can be safely traversed by a pulse of light.
-Luke Butcher, Cambridge Cosmology department.
Emphasis mine.

[MonkeyHead]

Interesting theory. Experimentally testing it however would be... challenging, to say the least.

[Putnam]

Nearly impossible. Note that this assumes that the wormhole exists in the first place.

[Gentlefish]

How do we find a wormhole?