Developing Nuclear Power Plant Tech For the Moon and Mars 273
With his first accepted Slashdot submission, Zandamesh sends this excerpt from ZDNet: "On earth, nuclear reactors are under attack because of concerns over damage caused by natural disasters. In space, however, nuclear technology may get a new lease on life. Plans for the first nuclear power plant for the production of electricity to be used by manned or unmanned bases on the Moon, Mars and other planets have been unveiled at the 242nd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society. 'The reactor itself may be about 1 ½ feet wide by 2 ½ feet high, about the size of a carry-on suitcase. There are no cooling towers. ... The team is scheduled to build a technology demonstration unit in 2012."
Protesters (Score:4, Insightful)
While possibly a good idea, be prepared for the protesters. Specifically the group that complains every time a rocket blasts off carrying fissile material. What if it explodes on launch?
Also, expect a few wingnuts who complain about ruining the pristine landscape of the moon.
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What if it explodes on launch?
Not that this ever happens [slashdot.org]...
Re:Protesters (Score:5, Insightful)
A more accurate link would have been this [wikipedia.org].
I'm not arguing for complete negligence, but rather that this is an engineering issue that can be solved.
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Don't expect logic, science or reason to prevail with the NIMBYs...
Re:Protesters (Score:5, Informative)
Very little. Uranium is actually natural. They will not "turn on" the reactor until it is far from earth. You can stand next to uranium all day long and it will not hurt you. The main problem is when it decays it produced Radon gas "again this is natural" which can cause lung cancer. So this as actually safer than an RTG and really very safe. The thing is that people will yell in fear first and then ignore research. BTW.
I do not work for NASA or any Aerospace firm and the launch pad is pretty near my home so it is sort of in my back yard so I have ZERO interest in down playing any danger.
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What? Do you not know the difference between safe and harmless?
Anyway just more fear mongering.
Enriched uranium is not significantly more radioactive than natural uranium as long is it is sub critical.
A launch vehicle exploding will not convert reactor fuel into powder. Have you ever seen what is left after a rocket fails? It is pretty big chunks.
Combine the facts that very little uranium dust will be formed with the fact that it will not be near people AKA a few miles away and you have pretty harmless and
Re:Protesters (Score:4, Interesting)
But won't a pile of enriched Uranium go "boom" in the night if too much of it is put together? (just kidding.... I know better about that too).
The problem is really ignorance of nuclear physics, coupled with a sanctification and consecration of THE HOLY WRIT that anything nuclear must be reserved for the exclusive province of just a few specialized priests (aka researchers) who have gone through a sacred refinement and ordination by the ONE TRUE LEADER (aka a series of national security clearance reviews) in order to be even allowed to gaze upon the sacred texts which permit you to even begin to comprehend all of that most terrible knowledge. Forget about experimentation, all of the knowledge we really need to know can be obtained through simulation with our trusty supercomputers.
I call that utter bullshit, where there is an irrational fear of anything nuclear. There are legitimate concerns about radioactive materials and it can become dangerous under certain conditions. The same can be said about water, dirt, molten steel, and a large number of other things in our environment. Far more people die of Dihydrogen Monoxide poisoning than die from excessive radiation, so should we ban that chemical from society too? I'd love to see an activist try.... seriously!
If you are worried about contamination from uranium dust, just don't live downwind from a coal-powered electric generating plant. That is by far and away a much more dangerous proposition in terms of radiation contamination alone (forget the "greenhouse gasses) than even being literally next door to a multi-gigawatt nuclear power plant.
BTW, getting back to the meat of the actual article rather than responding to obviously clueless people (not really trolls, they are just ignorant) one thing I like about this particular proposal is that it is a small scale nuclear power plant. I wish we has more plants like that here on the Earth, where literally every small town had their own municipal nuclear power plant generating perhaps a couple hundred kilowatts rather than having these major gigawatt plants. While there are economies of scale that I'll admit, the problem with big plants is the concentration of material where an accident is much harder to clean up. A much smaller plant like is suggested in this article could be cleaned up by just a small team or even entirely by robots and easily contained even if you had a Chernobyl or Fukushima situation, both of which represented lousy reactor designs in the first place. Current generation nuclear power plants simply can't have a melt-down due to raw physics being applied to the design.
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Well it will be unpleasant.
Actually most information about nuclear reactors work is available on the internet and your high school physics class.
I left out one thing about the Uranium dust. Don't use rock phosphate in your garden. It has a good amount of uranium in it.
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Nope because the again there will be very little if any dust. The average rocket if it explodes tends to be a "soft" explosion and not a high explosive. Challenger if you remember was blowen to pieces but some of the crew survived until impact. It was not reduced to dust. A reactor will be much tougher than a human body or even the shuttle. So again no fears.
"OK loooong time ago so I may be misremembering but it seems to me there were arguments about this with one or more of the Apollo missions because a t
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FYI we already have a reactor in space.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNAP-10A [wikipedia.org]
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While the concept is related, the reactor is going to offer much more power production per kilogram than an RTG and last longer as well in terms of useful production lifetime.
It should also be of note that every Apollo mission (except Apollo 11) to the Moon brought up RTGs to power some of the monitoring equipment left behind with the ALSEP [wikipedia.org] experiments. Nuclear devices wouldn't even be something new on the Moon.
I knew of a couple of folks working with the Google Lunar X-Prize competition who had strongly c
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Would a real controlled fission reaction work or mars? How about the moon?
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Physics is the same in both those places as here on Earth. Yes, they would work.
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Why would it not work?
The problems you encounter is that you would have to use something other than water for a moderator, so designs would by necessity be a little different. You also can't build a plant with the theory of using tons of concrete can act as a shield, as limestone-based concrete is not going to be cheap nor easy to get to the Moon. So instead, you use local materials which do essentially the same thing. This reactor is to be partially buried beneath the surface of the Moon (a bulldozer pu
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The number of such protesters has been steadily decreasing over time and is now essentially zero. Heck, Curiosity is within a few weeks of launching and nobody (of those who protest, file lawsuits, etc...) seems to have even noticed.
I'll be protesting, alright . . . (Score:2)
Might as well use the same technology to place some flags on the outskirts of the solar system that can be discovered by other civilizations and warn them not to go near the radioactive hell hole, or what will be left of it,
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Just wait when somehow a colony of microbes is found somewhere under the surface of the Moon. Then the eco-nuts will really go crazy and demand we shut down further Lunar exploration except for an exploration model like is being done in Antarctica.
Re:Protesters (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd prefer the moon without nuclear contamination
This makes about as much sense as standing next to the mouth of a volcano and complaining that your neighbour's barbecue is making you too hot.
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Isn't space full of radiation as it is?
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I'd prefer the moon without nuclear contamination, so that there can be a safe moon base there. That doesn't exclude nuclear power, but there is a middle way of safety to choose between "wingnuts/protesters" and carelessness.
Safe?
A moon base will need shielding from cosmic rays, which I know aren't the same as gamma or beta radiation, but it's a start. It'll also need to be airtight - natch - so that ought to take care of alpha radiation and fallout too.
Just what danger does an external nuclear reactor pose to people inside a moon base anyway? Not much, I'd bet, but the reactor might well be inside anyway so the problem of uglying up the lunar landscape is the same as a base using any other means of power generation. Hell, a lo
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Groups which complain about nuclear devices on rockets are purely modern Luddites [wikipedia.org] in the most literal and complete sense. Courts should routinely dismiss them as the ignorant fools that they are, and the only serious threat they pose is as potential terrorists or that their ignorance may contaminate our children.
The wingnuts who complain about people spoiling the Moon are in my opinion perhaps even more dangerous because their argument is much more seductive to many people. The visual appearance of the Mo
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My response to that comment would be to simply mine the Uranium on the Moon. There is plenty of that stuff up on the Moon, since according to current theories the Moon pretty much is the Earth anyway, or at least the same materials. There is no reason to suspect you can't find "yellowcake" or other similar concentrations of Uranium ore on the Moon.
These nuts simply don't care, they just hate humanity in general and just are trying to find an excuse to shut down technology.
Solar Power (Score:2)
If they would just cover Mars where the Sun shines, with Solar power facilities, they would generate as much energy, if not more, and they wouldn't have to worry about any messy nuclear waste or negative press. So the interesting part of this discovery is that back in the 1950's when there were all the sci-fi movies about Martians attacking us and sending probes up our you-know-whats, the reality is we will be likely sending an army of robots to Mars to do our bidding!
Re:Solar Power (Score:5, Funny)
That DOES sound easier than sending suitcase sized devices to places where we actually need power.
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A power plant on Mars...necessary human development if we intend on colonizing space
Which is we they want to fly a nuclear plant up there.
we'd better learn about getting along and maximizing our resources so that we can continue to thrive as a species
This is the exact problem nuclear solves, better than any other current technology. Which is why it is the best option for powering a moonbase.
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I'm not disagreeing with your statement that good power generation on Mars is necessary for colonization, but a) it has downsides:
- Solar cells do not produce much power per unit of mass.
- The available sunlight is substantially weaker, due to the increased distance from the sun
- Getting accumulated power off planet is still a difficult problem.
b) it's a solution to a different problem than we are really discussing. The problem that these suitcases are designed to address is this: where do you get power wh
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Oh great (Score:3)
Getting it there (Score:2)
Yeah, most environmentalists won't care about operating a nuclear reactor on Mars (some will of course. Loonies are loonies), but many (very, very many) will bitch and moan to no end about launching nuclear material on rockets in case they explode. Right now it isn't so much of an issue (because, well, most people don't know we do it and we don't do it often) but if it enters public consciousness you can expect a massive backlash against it, and no set of statistics about how safe the rockets are will stop
Just wondering... (Score:2, Funny)
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I'm no expert, but I don't believe the amounts are enough to generate any useable amount of power... also you'd have to somehow build antennas of various lengths to capture that radiation.
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Cooling towers? In a vacuum? (Score:2)
I don't see how traditional cooling towers would work for anything in a vacuum, as they're designed as heat exchangers against ambient air, and use convection to draw fresh air in for dumping waste heat into, exhausting it out the top...
If anything, they'd need to do a geothermal-style ground-loop system, where they drill several boreholes, plumb them with loops, and then fill in the extra space with the regolith they originally bored out. Use the ground as a heatsink for the hot water from the secondary e
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There are no cooling towers. ...
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Yeah, I got that part. I was marveling that anyone would even reasonably expect cooling towers, AT ALL in a vacuum. Slashdot is a fairly educated crowd, and I'd figure that most readers would know that they wouldn't work.
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It's from the article, where they discuss how different this reactor is from the public stereotypes of a nuclear reactor.
(Although as we all know, cooling towers are hardly unique to nuclear reactors.)
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See above [slashdot.org] and likely below. Space isn't hot or cold, it's vacuum (pretty much). You only have radiative cooling.
SCV ready?? (Score:2)
I was going to post a witty Starcraft reference, but how are we going to *safely* extract and enrich (or ship in a rocket) uranium in outer space?
Space rocks. (Score:2)
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About time. (Score:2)
Gee, that's great. (Score:3)
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A nuclear reactor isn't a nuclear weapon. It's no more dangerous - and a good deal less covert - than a lead suitcase full of nicked nuclear fuel.
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A nuke plant the size of a CARRY-ON SUITCASE. I don't see any problems with that getting into the wrong hands...
Yeah, in the hands of the wrong person it might just allow poor people to have heat, light, refrigeration, filtered water, cooked food, and the Internet without paying a dime to the local energy conglomerate. That absolutely must not be allowed to happen!
mining is the first step (Score:3)
Before we even think about a permanent lunar settlement we need to think about lunar mining to extract iron, aluminum, copper, and uranium ore.
Then we need to work on solar (parabolic or fresnel) furnaces to melt the ore and process it into metal. The lack of oxygen will make some of the traditional smelting techniques more difficult however. We may have to live with metals with inferior properties because we have to invent a whole new metallurgy up there.
Having a working nuclear reactor there in the beginning would make everything a lot easier. I don't know if photovoltaics could supply enough power for things like earth (regolith) moving machinery.
In the beginning we could limit ourselves to collecting the loose regolith with solar powered bulldozers, backhoes, and more specialized mining equipment. For the heavier minerals underneath we'd have to wait for a higher power density solution.
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While I am a fan of this (Score:2)
Space Quakes! (Score:2)
You just wait until the space quakes hit, and all that radiation is released, contaminating space with radiation for years to come.
That said, this is very old news. This type of thing has existed and has been in use for half a century. However these are pretty low powered devices (unless this is supposed to be different), that only produce like 500W of power over a period of 80 years or so. So depending on what you plan on using these for power at these "bases", it is not like they are going to power everyt
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You're think of RTGs. This is a proper grown-up 40kW reactor, shrunk to the size of a suitcase.
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The only "numbers" in either article are:
"...which was a 45 kWt thermal nuclear fission reactor that produced 650 watts using a thermoelectric converter..."
So the one in 1965 was a 45kWt, but actually produces 650 watts.
The one on Voyager did 450 watts I believe.
In any event the article is so lacking in details it is hard to take any of it as credible.
Real merit of TFA (Score:2)
The real merit of TFA is it state for the large audience there is no energy source out there strong enough to sustain human life beyond nearer planets. So, we can conclude that old dream to colonize the space beyond the solar system is extincted once and for all, provided a trip to the nearest solar system is a 40000 years journey and even if we can manage to protect the life from the cosmic rays on an hypothetical ship, we still have the energy problem to sustain life, even in hibernation state.
Also, is th
RTG or not? (Score:3)
TFA is remarkably light on details. The ZDnet article refers to the SNAP-10A satellite, which had a 45 kWt reactor that produced 650 watts of electrical power via thermoelectric converters, which is not much for a device that's about the same size as this new proposal. If they want to produce 40 KWe from a small package, some other technology may be needed.
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The ACS article mentions that the team would be working on a small electric pump for the liquid metal-cooled system. So we know at least that it is not a purely solid state RTG like we've been using for satellites all these years. That implies that there might, might be some innovation taking place here. The power plant could still be using the th
Reticulating Splines (Score:3)
This is beginning of something far more important than nuclear power: Microwave Transmission.
Didn't the soviets already do this? (Score:3)
No I don't mean did they put one of these on the moon (and certainly not mars, I don't think any of their landers made it).
No, I mean didn't they have a bunch of high powered satellites in earth orbit that used reactors (NOT just RTGs, they wouldn't produce enough power). I believe they were radar satellites that scanned the oceans looking for American carrier groups to kill. (The U.S. really has a HUGE advantage in its many bases and allies worldwide, this is something that required the soviets to create satellites like this. It is an advantage that will also take the Chinese a very long time, if ever, to match). In fact didn't one of their satellites COSMOS I think it was, crash in Canada spewing plutonium all over the place and costing millions to clean up?
That said, if the design is sound (the spacecraft malfunctioned not the reactor right?), wouldn't it be easy to adapt their zero-gee design to work on the moo or mars? Should actually be easier, gravity will let convection work and (on mars) the thin atmosphere will help the purely radiative cooling.
We've Already Done Most of the Work: LFTR Reactors (Score:2)
LFTRs advantages:
Re:Nuclear on the moon? (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe for Earth, but solar energy is not viable for long-term use on a world in which night lasts for two weeks.
Sending a bunch of solar cells to the moon is easy. It's launching the batteries that's the dealbreaker at current launch costs. If you need lots of baseline power in a small package, nuclear's the only viable tech.
Ditto for Mars - not just because it's further away, but because soft-landing a lot of mass on Mars is arguably more difficult than landing on the Moon. Not just due to gravity, but Mars' atmosphere is dense enough to burn up a spacecraft, but not dense enough to avoid the requirement for colossal parachutes or really fancy retro-rocket landing systems.
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Also, there's probably situations where you can stop doing stuff for two weeks (say a robotic mining operation or automated monitoring station). Still probably have to keep the stuff warm, but there are other alternatives than batteries for that.
Some of the weird Marti
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Maybe for Earth, but solar energy is not viable for long-term use on a world in which night lasts for two weeks.
Sending a bunch of solar cells to the moon is easy. It's launching the batteries that's the dealbreaker at current launch costs. If you need lots of baseline power in a small package, nuclear's the only viable tech.
Ditto for Mars - not just because it's further away, but because soft-landing a lot of mass on Mars is arguably more difficult than landing on the Moon. Not just due to gravity, but Mars' atmosphere is dense enough to burn up a spacecraft, but not dense enough to avoid the requirement for colossal parachutes or really fancy retro-rocket landing systems.
Really? Why don't you try using your imagination, instead of echoing tired-ass, discredited memes? Oh wait, you are an AC. The day/night argument against solar power goes away when you put the collector in orbit and use microwaves to transfer the energy. The day/night argument is fucking stupid and has been for about half a century, now. [wikipedia.org]
Putting a solar collection/conversion facility in a Lissajous near the L2 Lagrangian and beaming the energy to where you need it on the surface of the Moon/Mars solv
Re:Nuclear on the moon? (Score:5, Insightful)
Solar power is hardly "readily available" on the moon, unless Bob's Discount Solar Panels has relocated their manufacturing complex on the moon.
Solar panels have weight. I am going to guess that the kilowatts per pound for solar doesn't come anywhere near nuclear.
Solar panels degrade over time. You then have to launch all new panels. The reactor mass for nuclear would stay on the moon, you just send up more fuel.
You're concerned about losing it on launch? First, launch it over the ocean, like we do for pretty all US launches. Second, these reactors are pretty small. You can put launch abort systems on them. You can encase it in a lot of shielding. More than enough to survive a ballistic ocean crash.
Even if you do lose the thing, it is a small reactor. It will have a limited amount of fissionable material. You could dump it in the ocean and it would affect no one.
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Solar panels have weight. I am going to guess that the kilowatts per pound for solar doesn't come anywhere near nuclear.
Currently, it depends on the amount of power generated. Solar trumps nuclear for small installations. I think nuclear "batteries" beat solar on the small end, but cost a bundle so there are options.
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Yeah, I totally forgot to bring up the battery issue. That is easily the biggest problem with solar on the moon. Batteries are very heavy and charging them efficiently is difficult.
So you would need a baseline number of panels to generate power during the 2 weeks of light. Then you need more panels to charge the batteries for 2 weeks, to last the 2 weeks of darkness. But due to losses of charging, you probably need double the number of panels you need during the periods of light, just to charge the b
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Re:Nuclear on the moon? (Score:4, Insightful)
In order to get a reactor to the moon you have to launch it on a rocket, and rockets do not have a really great safety record.
The reactor doesn't start up until it's in place, so it's relatively safe until then. Plus if the launcher fails after the first minute or so it ends up at the bottom of the ocean.
The Russians have put reactors into space before, and I believe NASA did launch one before they settled on RTG and solar.
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The Russians have put reactors into space before, and I believe NASA did launch one before they settled on RTG and solar.
More to the point, the both the Americans and Russians have put a bunch of reactors on the sea floor in the past [wikipedia.org]. Hardly optimal, but not the end of the world.
And the proposed are reactors and much, much less dangerous than the naval ones. Smaller by several orders of magnitude. (Although I didn't see power factors in the article that I read, they have to be fairly small compared to a ship powering one).
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No you are wrong.
Do you know how much naturally accuring uranium is in the ocean? The answer is many tons. If you eat sea salt on your food you are eating Uranium along with Boron and Strontium, Uranium is natural and is found in many places all over the earth. A few kg of uranium falling into the sea or burning up in the atmosphere would be as close to harmless as modern math can get you. Unless you get hit by a piece. That is assuming they use uranium like most other reactors use. Spent fuel is dangerous
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rockets do not have a really great safety record.
What do you mean? Sure, SOMETIMES they fail spectacularly, but have you actually looked at the safety records? Can you quote me failed launches vs launch attempt stats? Airplanes also tend to fail spectacularly. That doesn't stop them from being the safest way to travel long distances.
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In order to get a reactor to the moon you have to launch it on a rocket, and rockets do not have a really great safety record. The risk/benefit trade-off of launching nuclear fuel through our atmosphere does not seem to be worth it, not when solar energy on the Moon is a readily available alternative.
I don't buy your first argument at all. Why would you have to launch the material on a rocket in the first place? Why does it even have to be launched from the Earth at all? There might be a need to launch some reactors to bootstrap industry on the Moon, but the materials for making these reactors could also be derived entirely from Lunar materials.
On top of that, the reactor and the fissile material don't have to be shipped together, and the fissile material can be put into storage containers which can
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The article mentions why solar was ruled out. Battery weight was one of them.
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The moon isn't small. As balls of rock in the solar system go, it's a big one. It's bigger than Pluto. It's not that far off from the size of Mercury.
The moon has a radius of about 1080 miles. since I doubt we're going to run electricity through the center of the moon, We're more concerned with surface distance. It's circumference is just shy of 6800 miles.
6800 miles is more than twice the distance from NY to LA. That's one hell of a long extension cord.
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different design points (Score:2)
The lack of air means they are going to have trouble dumping heat. From the picture I'm guessing big radiative heatsinks will be used. The temperature gradient will be much less than could be easily obtained on earth via water or even convective cooling. I am not a nuclear engineer but having had thermo I suspect that this difference in heat dumping ability would work its way back into the reactor design as well. I also remember from thermo that heat engines are always more efficient as they get bigger,
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Space is cold. So very cold. There's no problem dumping heat, rather there's the problem of dumping heat and not destroying your heatsinks and bleeders because of the extreme hot/cold ratios.
best I could find on short notice (Score:3)
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpaceIsCold [tvtropes.org]
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Space is cold, but without an atmosphere heat transfer does not work very well. Vacuum can't well take heat away. No particles to transfer heat to mean convection and conduction are right out, radiation is not a fast way to shed heat.
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Uh, no. No, it's not. In fact, since space is an almost-perfect vacuum, it's difficult to characterize it meaningfully as having any temperature at all. And since vacuum is an excellent insulator (how do you think your thermos works?) it's really hard to dump heat.
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Not sure I agree with that. Considering that cold is merely the absence of heat, and there's no matter to be in motion, you could easily say that it's cold. Maybe not in a heat-sapping way, but there should probably be another word for that.
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Wrong! Heat is not a substance that is present or absent (although some thermodynamic analyses find it useful to think of it that way). Temperature is the intrinsic random motion of the substance under consideration. If they are moving quickly, it's hot. If they are moving slowly, it's cold. If there's no substance there at all, which is (almost) the case in outer space, it is meaningless to talk about it being hot *or* cold.
what kind of rock (Score:2)
I wondered about this, but I'm concerned that the rock types might not be very conductive, or even have a very high specific heat in the absence of water. Pumice for instance would make a terrible heat sink.
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Not to mention the fact that we'd have to send another team of deep well drillers up to put holes in things. The last mission had tremendous loss of manpower and equipment. Although, somehow Bruce Willis survived and came back to Earth to continue his film career.
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Not to mention the fact that we'd have to send another team of deep well drillers up to put holes in things. The last mission had tremendous loss of manpower and equipment. Although, somehow Bruce Willis survived and came back to Earth to continue his film career.
Not really. Just control the descent until you're going fast enough to drill the spike into the ground but slow enough so that the structure remains intact. Gotta think these things through - it's Rocket Science.
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Nuclear power as employed now is not truly clean, but doesn't mean it can't be if new reactor designs were built.
The problem with nuclear power as I see it is that if there's ever an accident the response is "Don't build any more power stations!" instead of "Build newer*, safer stations and decommission the old ones."
*i.e. basic designs that aren't older than I am. If you want a car analogy, try this: carburettors could only take the automobile so far; to make progress we had to ditch the whole concept and
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Who says anything about rods? As I said: you are stuck in yesterday's technology and yesterday's thinking. This needs to get out of government jurisdiction and it needs to go back where it belongs - the private sector working on ways to deliver nuclear power in small packages.
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Who says anything about rods? As I said: you are stuck in yesterday's technology and yesterday's thinking. This needs to get out of government jurisdiction and it needs to go back where it belongs - the private sector working on ways to deliver nuclear power in small packages.
Someone set us up the bomb!
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There is not going to be a nuclear car. Period.
- too bad you are an AC, it would have been great to point out the stupidity of your post in the future to nuclear car drivers.
Just because you think you know what the future holds based on the current status quo and your agenda absolutely does not mean that you are in any way right.
People said all sorts of things in the past about tech that couldn't possibly happen - why, we are not birds, we can't fly, and if we did, we'd fall out of the sky and be crashed. We can't go too fast, faster than a galloping h
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It must be fun to live in your batshit crazy libertarian world.
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You are assuming, of course, that it would be launched from a country whose political leaders give a damn about that sort of thing. Last time I looked all of the places that cave to NIMBY whiners don't have any money to launch such a thing, so it is a moot point.
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Actually not really. The people that live near the Cape will be fine with it. The protesters tend to come from out of town. As someone that lives near the cape and has for my entire life I can say. IMBY.
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Is this really any easier or safer if there are plans for humans to ever be on that body again?
You do realise that space is so full of radiation that any long-term base on the Moon or Mars will probably need to be buried a few feet under the ground, right?
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So what's worse - your default space radiation or some enriched nuclear fuel lying around or able to find its way inside your systems?
The radiation from nuclear fuel is negligible compared to the radiation from solar flares which can kill you in a few minutes.
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Moon. No atmosphere. No hydrosphere. No biosphere.
This nuke could explode and you'd have a bunch of small lumps of uranium spread over a few tens of metres, increasing local background radiation at that spot by a few percent. A nuclear waste dump on the moon would be open dumping in a small crater, marked with a small flashing beacon so you can find it again because you'd have to be on top of it before you can detect it.
Space. Totally different game.
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That is a pretty big back yard you have. Doing the lawn must be tiresome.
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