NASA Developing Nuclear Reactor For Moon and Mars 424
Al writes "NASA recently finished testing a miniature nuclear reactor that would provide power for an astronaut base on the Moon or Mars. The reactor combines a small fission system with a Stirling engine to make a 'safe, reliable, and efficient' way to produce electricity. The system being tested at NASA's Glenn Research Center can produce 2.3 kilowatts and could be ready for launch by 2020, NASA officials say. The reactor ought to provide much more power than solar panels but could prove controversial with the public concerned about launching a nuclear power source and placing it on the Moon or another planet."
Cheap? (Score:2, Insightful)
"We are not building a system that needs hundreds of gigawatts of power like those that produce electricity for our cities," says Don Palac, the project manager at NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, OH. The system needs to be cheap, safe, and robust and "our recent tests demonstrated that we can successfully build that," says Palac.
I read this as, "the system needs to come in at no more than half the cost of a gigawatt power plant". I'm all for space travel, but I can't help but flinch when I hear somebody at NASA say "cheap".
Re:Cheap? (Score:5, Insightful)
Orders of Magnitude (Available Enthalpy) (Score:3, Informative)
Weight is the main factor in the number of things that can go up in a rocket.
Nuclear is inherently a big win, in terms of Available Enthalpy (if scared, just read: Power) versus weight. Chemical reactions can yield 13 megajoules per kilogram. Nuclear fission can get you 82 million megajoules per kilogram. In terms of possible exhaust velocity, you can get 4.5 km/s out of chemical propellants, but a potential 12,800 km/s out of nuclear. Fusion is even better with 347 million MJ/kg of useful energy. But only using present day technology, beamed power sources can match anything ou
The public doesn't want it on the Moon huh? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The public doesn't want it on the Moon huh? (Score:5, Funny)
Then they can give the reactor to me and I can finally send the power company a photocopy of my ass
What, your photocopier only works with on-site nuclear power?
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Then they can give the reactor to me and I can finally send the power company a photocopy of my ass
What, your photocopier only works with on-site nuclear power?
No it will just continue to work with on-site power after I send the photocopy to the power company in place of my bill.
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No it will just continue to work with on-site power after I send the photocopy to the power company in place of my bill.
Maybe a sign that you should hit the gym more?
Re:The public doesn't want it on the Moon huh? (Score:5, Funny)
Must be a very large ass if he needs a nuclear powered photocopier.
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Must be a very large ass if he needs a nuclear powered photocopier.
It's mean to call him that. You've never even met him!
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Nuclear Power on the Moon FTW! (Score:4, Interesting)
Nuclear power is actually one of the safest, cleanest, and most reliable forms of power ever invented. So long as no meteroites hit it, we should be fine. Huh. Wonder what caused all those craters on the moon.....
Re:Nuclear Power on the Moon FTW! (Score:5, Insightful)
And if a meteor *does* strike the reactor, we are going to contaminate the Moon with radioactivity? More than being exposed to an unshielded fusion reactor for 4.5 billion years?
Brett
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Re:Nuclear Power on the Moon FTW! (Score:5, Funny)
Lol, sounds like another opportunity! Head out to the next anti-nuclear rally and get people to sign a petition to shut down this unshielded fusion reactor. It's exposing us to several types of radiation every day, even as we speak! It causes severe burns on many people every day! Many species won't come out of their burrows because of it! While you're at it, you can ask them about their opinion of dihydrogen-monoxide.
Re:Nuclear Power on the Moon FTW! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Nuclear Power on the Moon FTW! (Score:4, Insightful)
Not really -- got these things called "Space Suits," I think -- you could place the reactor away from the colony, theoretically. We'd still have to test these "Space Suits" to see if they work, possibly land some men on the moon beforehand to see if they operate correctly, of course.
Re:Nuclear Power on the Moon FTW! (Score:5, Funny)
Never, ever, place you power source outside the buildings.
The aliens will simply cut the line, leaving you only 120 minutes (less Coming Attraction Previews) to figure out what's going on and go fix it.
Then, of course, the first few people you send after it will be killed and turned into alien zombies.
Then, when you finally figure that out, you have to crawl through the air ducts to get to the reactor (even though the reactor is supposedly isolated from the buildings) to sneak into the Alien queen's chamber and burn her to a crisp with the flame thrower that is standard issue on a moon colony.
Sheesh...don't you guys know anything?
Re:Nuclear Power on the Moon FTW! (Score:5, Insightful)
If a sizable meteor strikes your moon colony, you're going to be worried about the chance that it hits the reactor? Not the mess hall or the kindergarten? Any accident on the moon that gives people time to don space suits is a best-case accident. What is it about "nuclear" that makes people's brains turn off?
Re:Nuclear Power on the Moon FTW! (Score:5, Insightful)
What is it about "nuclear" that makes people's brains turn off?
Hmm, that's a tough question, but I'm gonna go with the past 50 or so years of media hysterics.
Re:Nuclear Power on the Moon FTW! (Score:4, Informative)
What is it about "nuclear" that makes people's brains turn off?
The same mindset, I guess, that prompted the medical profession to quietly change the name of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging (NMRI) to Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Nobody wanted an NMRI but now people line up for an MRI, at least here in Canada.
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At least some portion of the reactor may need to be placed inside the habitat to make convenient monitoring and servicing possible.
Well, I suppose you could stick it up on the surface where it's subject to dust and solar radiation and meteorites. Was anyone actually proposing to do that, though?
Re:Nuclear Power on the Moon FTW! (Score:5, Funny)
The problem would be what exactly?
The impact to the wildlife on the moon?
Re:Nuclear Power on the Moon FTW! (Score:5, Funny)
Shouldn't be that dangerous (Score:5, Informative)
The uranium that goes into a reactor isn't all that radioactive - it's the spent fuel that comes out that's the problem. If a rocket carrying this thing explodes on take off it isn't going to be Chernobyl. In fact, it sounds a good deal safer than all those Pu-238 RTGs that have been sent up there.
Mod parent up please (Score:5, Informative)
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The uranium fuel used in reactors is predominantly U-238 mixed with a small percentage (3-4%) of enriched U-235. U-235 is the fissile material and while it does spontaneously emit neutrons at a low level, it becomes useful for power generation when
Chemistry not physics (Score:3, Informative)
It shouldn't be any more controversial... (Score:5, Insightful)
It shouldn't be more controversial than the reactors that powered Voyager and other deep space probes. There have been protests over some of the more potentially dangerous reactors that might have caused contamination over a wide area if they blew up; but IIRC they launched anyway.
A reactor that small shouldn't require a huge ammount of fissile material. I bet it could blow up in the atmosphere and produce less radiation than we get from a day of coal fired power in the Eastern US. Coal is full of trace radioactive elements, and it adds up when you burn as much as we do.
You forget two key points. (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Ignorance.
2. The Internet
There is a whole lot of people who can now be offended at things they would never have heard of before or hand reason to be offended of. Never under estimate the ability of humans to make ignorance even more prevalent. What many thought would free us from ignorance only seemed to exaggerate it more.
I guess there is another option, it never ceases to amaze me how many people can find offense in anything. I think they have a need to be noticed or to find a way to blame others for any condition they are in.
Re:It shouldn't be any more controversial... (Score:5, Informative)
Uranium is "huggably safe" before a reactor is actually turned on. With a half-life of a billion years it's more dangerous as a heavy metal than anything else.
Plutonium is nasty if powdered or vaporized, but NASA designed a "safe" for the Cassini plutonium RTG that would survive being dropped at any point during the launch path.
The hydrazine [wikipedia.org] fuel used in the maneuvering thrusters in spacecraft and the Space Shuttle's APUs is amazingly toxic. In most scenarios a tank of hydrazine is more of a danger than a lump of plutonium. Off-Earth, a hydrazine APU is just exposing astronauts to unneeded danger to avoid "scary nuclear scary scary".
Re:It shouldn't be any more controversial... (Score:5, Informative)
Hydrazine is not all that bad compared to the oxidizer used, nitrogen tetraoxide. People used to sniff for hydrazine leaks with their nose (smells like rotten fish) early in satellite development. Nitrogen tetraoxide smell like the inside of your nose being dissolved.
But your general point is correct in that the chemical effects of most of these items are far more problematic than the radioactivity, and the chemical effects can be dealt with reasonable safety as has been proven for decades.
Brett
Re:It shouldn't be any more controversial... (Score:4, Informative)
Hydrazine is a little bit more toxic than you make it out to be.
The F-16's epu uses hydrazine (about 80 lbs of it are in a tank aft of the cockpit). During epu tests, everyone gets upwind (regulation). Our hydrazine response team wear full-protection SCBA spacesuits to clean it up. If a person is exposed, they get regular blood tests for the rest of their lives.
I work closely with a few people who have been exposed, and they are reminded with every passing hour that they cannot breath as well or feel as well. You can say, "yeah, comes with the territory," but it's pretty heartbreaking when you know that these guys have beautiful kids who are probably going to lose their dads within 10 years...
-b
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Re:It shouldn't be any more controversial... (Score:5, Informative)
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Fission is the splitting of the nucleus into two (or more?) large pieces. It's not a very common decay mode. The release of neutrons and the usual radioactivity of the pieces makes it dirtier.
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Actually, an RTG has more risk than a reactor, as others have pointed out. A just-started reactor that has no spent fuel has almost no radioactivity, so if it blew up on launch and was completely torn apart, the biggest risk is just the heavy metal poisoning, not the radioactivity.
However, an RTG gets its power from the heat of the radiation, so it is required to be moderately radioactive. Even then you would try to design it to rely on alpha radiation, rather than beta or gamma, so that it can capture th
Rather there than here... (Score:2)
Besides, in 90 years, when they've built up a huge moonbase and a large stockpile of spent nuclear material, it can explode and send the moon hurtling out of the solar system! It'll be Space: 19992099!
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Engine (Score:5, Informative)
Sterling engine? (Score:5, Informative)
An engine made out of silver [wikipedia.org]? Or just a generally excellent [merriam-webster.com] one? Ah, a Stirling engine [wikipedia.org].
More quality editing from Slashdot...
!Sterling but Stirling (Score:2, Informative)
Stirling from the name of inventor - Dr. Robert Stirling.
That's only 20 Amps at 115V (Score:3, Interesting)
That's one standard kitchen outlet in North America. You could run a coffee maker and a microwave, but not a whole lot more...
How much does it weigh in total (including shielding etc)?
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Re:That's only 20 Amps at 115V (Score:5, Informative)
Read the article. 2.3 kW is the test version, they want to scale it up to 40 kW for the base:
The recent tests examined technologies that would see a nuclear reactor coupled with a Stirling engine capable of producing 40 kilowatts of energy--enough to power a future lunar or Mars outpost.
40 kW is approximately 17 outlets that can handle 20 A at 115 V. Yeah, it's still not a ton but it's a start and you could potentially put up several of these reactors as you expand the facility. This would also add fault-tolerance to the entire system.
Re:That's only 20 Amps at 115V (Score:4, Interesting)
40 kW is approximately 17 outlets that can handle 20 A at 115 V.
So, if all they ran were grow lights, that would be about 30 grow lights? I'm thinking that is not enough to grow the food for even one person during the lunar night. Assuming all you did with your electricity was grow some chow. I think one grow light's worth of plants is not enough for one persons daily food intake, and you're not going to grow a crop in rotation 30 days.
True, you've got plenty of light during the long lunar day, maybe it would be possible to do reduced light for 8 hours to 3 plants, but thats probably going to screw up the growth cycle of ... anything?
Hmm. So if you electrolyze water at a rate of 40 kW, and the average human needs about 3 Kg a day (rounded up) how many people can breathe? Of course you also need life support to freeze the CO2 out of the atmosphere, and some way to turn that CO2 into C and O2 or into plant matter.
No, I'm thinking you need well over 40 KW per person for a sustainable moon colony.
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It would be silly to use this for loads of growlights, when you have places on the moon where you can obtain near total sunlight. You will have to raise some pipes up and redirect the sun down, but I am certain that a number of spots on the poles can be found to do that with.
Re:That's only 20 Amps at 115V (Score:4, Interesting)
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Then you pair it with low draw systems and a large capacitor.
That's just their test rig anyway - the model. TFA States:
The recent tests examined technologies that would see a nuclear reactor coupled with a Stirling engine capable of producing 40 kilowatts of energy--enough to power a future lunar or Mars outpost.
That oughta be enough.
Why the west is doomed (Score:4, Interesting)
All of our inhibitions about nuclear power is why we are doomed. Actually even wrote about this previously... the real danger to the west is not nuclear proliferation from atomic bombs, but from third world countries adopting nuclear mining, nuclear aircraft, nuclear ships, and nuclear spacecraft and pretty much leaving the west behind in a windmill driven green feel good stone ages.
Re:Why the west is doomed (Score:5, Insightful)
The real danger to the west is the overwhelming number of complete fucking idiots it breeds that demand that all technological progress is halted "for teh children!1".
They're a danger to the rest of the world too.
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They're a danger to the rest of the world too.
Yeah, but in the rest of the world they're given a nice hot mug of STFU.
If you're taking a reactor anyway... (Score:5, Interesting)
Why not re-open research into nuclear thermal rockets? They were able to get them up to 40% efficiency back in 1972, I'm would hope we can do better than that now. Use the reactor to heat a propellant to get you to the moon, then use the reactor on the moon to power the base. If it's time to head home, you only need to ship a relatively stable propellant up, rather than actual rocket fuel.
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Not so much speed as efficiency, VASIMR [wikipedia.org] is a great old technology because it has a high specific impulse, basically acceleration per unit fuel, not because it can go from 0-60 in 4 seconds flat (which it could).
Unfortunately, 40kW is hardly sufficient for a VASIMR system, which requires many MW of power to operate at high SI. For example, all together the ISS right now produces something like 130kW of power with solar, meaning it will have to charge a battery to be able to use the VASIMR they intend to inst
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Because we have VASMIR coming. Combine that with a nice nuclear reactor and we are looking at some good speeds.
The 2.3kW of this sterling engine doesnt speak to that promise. The 40kW they hope to have a ground system producing doesnt instill much confidenc either. ISS produces around 130kW, via a colossal truss-work of solar panels. These are all far short of the 400kW power needed for the target baseline VASIMR engine, and well short of the multi MW power levels VASIMR really is designed for.
Nuclear power generates heat. Heat differential is then used to drive turbines. In space, you may be able to make
Small fission reactor? (Score:2)
Electrical Power for VASIMR engines (Score:5, Insightful)
When I first saw this, I thought it was for powering VASIMR [adastrarocket.com] plasma engines.
Recently, AW&ST had an article suggesting that transit times between Mars and Earth 30 days could be possible using a continuously running VASIMR engine (it has an insanely high specific impulse). BUT, it would require a nuclear power source because the amount of solar panels (especially outside of earth's orbit) woudl be impractical.
myke
Why not expoit temperature (Score:3, Interesting)
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NASA is years away from building, lofting and installing anything that requires miles of tubing.
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
WHere do they put the heat? (Score:3, Insightful)
Ok, great, they put the heat in one side of the Sterling Cycle Engine, and it moves to the other side and we get motion, but what do they do with the heat? There's no air/water to bump against a cooling fin to get the activity of the molecules. Does the "icy vacuum of space" actually cool things very well?
If it did, why wouldn't a sterling cycle engine with one side in the shade and one side in the sun work pretty darn well anyhow?
I suspect that it DOESN'T, in which case they'll need to bore a big hole to put the heat in via fluid transferring to lunar dirt.
From the article: 1080 Square feet of cooling (Score:3, Informative)
Ah, the articles says they'll have 1080 square feet of cooling. I'm not sure whether that says the vacuum stinks at cooling or not.
How much would be needed in air?
Re:WHere do they put the heat? (Score:4, Interesting)
Ok, great, they put the heat in one side of the Sterling Cycle Engine, and it moves to the other side and we get motion, but what do they do with the heat? There's no air/water to bump against a cooling fin to get the activity of the molecules. Does the "icy vacuum of space" actually cool things very well?
Yeah, it does. An infinitely large radiator protected from the sun and from the surface would cool to around 2.7 degrees kelvin, pretty chilly. When you understand why it won't cool any further, then you'll know a lot more than you need for this engineering problem, although it is interesting. There are engineering limitations where adding another kilometer of radiator tubing to drop from 4K to 3K just isn't worth the cost of tubing, and/or the power required to pump the refrigerant thru the tubes. Radiation power increases as a pretty high power of temperature.
If it did, why wouldn't a sterling cycle engine with one side in the shade and one side in the sun work pretty darn well anyhow?
Look up the rotation period of the moon. Very roughly, Dark for 2 weeks, Light for 2 weeks. Unless you make a engine thats about 1/2 the circumference of the moon (or, just the diameter, if you were REALLY hard core). Which is not totally out of the question, although it would be a heck of an amazing civil engineering project.
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"Yeah, it does."
No, it doesn't. You can cool things only by radiation in vacuum. And radiation is quite slow, on Earth the major contributor in cooling is convection.
Well OK this is very Slashdot, your point of view is that radiative cooling is pretty bad in comparison to convection cooled cooling towers on earth, or phase change cooling towers (with water misters) or conduction cooling if near a nice cool lake/river. And my point of view is that radiative is pretty good, compared to having to build a reactor cooling tower plus an atmosphere, or build an ocean. Really, radiative cooling is pretty good considering that its dumping heat into "nothing" or into the univer
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A heat source on earth is cooled by conduction (a pot transferring heat to the surface its sitting on), convection (air moving over the surface and carrying away heat), and radiation (direct transmission of energy via photons). In the "icy vacuum of space" you get no conduction or convection, so you're limited to radiation as a method of dispensing of heat. If you're on the moon you can conduct a lot back into the ground as you suggest as well.
However, the black cold of space is a pretty good source to ra
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Ok, great, they put the heat in one side of the Sterling Cycle Engine, and it moves to the other side and we get motion, but what do they do with the heat? There's no air/water to bump against a cooling fin to get the activity of the molecules. Does the "icy vacuum of space" actually cool things very well?
Heat is only transferred through conduction or radiation, with radiation being the most efficient, convection is a movement of heated materials, but the heat itself is only ever conducted or radiated away.
If it did, why wouldn't a sterling cycle engine with one side in the shade and one side in the sun work pretty darn well anyhow?
I suspect that it DOESN'T, in which case they'll need to bore a big hole to put the heat in via fluid transferring to lunar dirt.
The key to the operation of any type of thermo-electric device is temprature differential, the greater the difference in temperature from one end to the other, the greater the power output. Sitting in the sun on earth, there would be a maximum of about 20-30 degrees difference in the most ideal situatio
Yawn. (Score:5, Insightful)
8 years isn't that much (Score:4, Interesting)
On an outpost that is hopefully* going to be permanently manned, 8 years seems a little short sighted. And if we're honest with ourselves, even those 8 years are not a realistic estimate. Consider that this thing has lots of movable parts and a very volatile coolant system all of which needs to withstand the extraordinary stress of launch and landing.
Consider RTGs on the other hand. They have no moving parts, a much longer lifespan, and a very well known failure mode (continuous degradation of the fission core and thermoelectric elements). While they do degrade considerably over several decades, they do not ever need maintenance and they don't fail suddenly like this very expensive and complex reactor will. Of course 40kW is an energy budget that could only be satisfied by several of these modules, but on the plus side this would promote a decentralized power architecture for the presumed offworld base. The reactor behemoth on the other hand will just fail spectacularly one day (probably after a long series of notorious problems that started on launch day) and Earth will need to ship a fucking big replacement package all the way up there while the Mars ground crew sits in the dark and with minimal life support, taking very shallow breaths.
* the reason I use that word here is because we probably will have just one phenomenally expensive mission that lasts a few weeks at the outset and after that we won't ever go there again. If the Moon mission era is any indication.
Reactors a better solution than solar panels? (Score:3, Insightful)
Somebody doesn't seem to have done the math here. 2.3 kW of power, assuming ~1100 W/m^2 insolation, a 30% conversion efficiency, gives something like an array of solar panels less than 9 ft by 9ft (2.7 m^2). Does the article discuss how much the reactor plus the engine might weigh? I have a hard time believing its lighter than a solar array (unless they intend to launch it cold and bury it on site to shield people from the radiation).
Note any lunar sites are likely to be in places where there is a mixture of sun/shade and where long term oxygen/water production is likely to be handled on-site (so they are likely to have gas storage and/or electrolysis capabilities) for energy storage during any dark periods.
Mars is a different problem where planetary rotation and reduced insolation (esp. during dust storms) may come into play. But given the increased abilities one can expect from semi-intelligent robots over the next 10-20 years we have no business sending fragile humans on risky missions to Mars anyway. The only humans who should be going to Mars are those who can afford to pay for the trip themselves and stupid enough to want to take the risks involved in doing so. At the risk of being flamed -- you might wish to keep in mind precisely *who* came up with the humans should visit Mars plan (ignoring the bright people who might have been involved who presumably have vested interests in human space exploration) [1].
1. And don't give me the "humans need a refuge site" song and dance. Give me a cost comparison per person study between a Mars colony and self-sustaining terrestrial sub-surface ocean/land colonies. Anything that represents a significant threat in the near future (millions of years) to sub-surface colonies on Earth probably represents a threat on the moon or Mars as well.
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Somebody doesn't seem to have done the math here. 2.3 kW of power, assuming ~1100 W/m^2 insolation, a 30% conversion efficiency, gives something like an array of solar panels less than 9 ft by 9ft (2.7 m^2). Does the article discuss how much the reactor plus the engine might weigh? I have a hard time believing its lighter than a solar array (unless they intend to launch it cold and bury it on site to shield people from the radiation).
The article is reporting on a test of a heat transfer and power production prototype, not a proposal for an actual reactor for moon deployment, with operational specifics. However, launching the reactor cold, and using cheap local materials for shielding, is exactly how such proposed schemes usually work.
But a key factor you are overlooking is how to provide continuous power. A solar system on the moon gets no light for 14 days at a stretch. This requires 775 kWH of power storage. Battery and flywheel techn
Re:mmhmmm (Score:4, Informative)
The specs would have this thing lasting 8 years.
And yeah, the sun does run out. Or at least it isn't useful when it goes through an extended night. Or if it is in a location that doesn't get direct sun (crater).
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Re:mmhmmm (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, until the fuel runs out. I'm pretty sure that with solar panels, the sun never runs out.
I'm 100% sure you are wrong.
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Where the parent fails is in
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oh and this is space we are talking about - inside the reactor is safe compared to most environments you'll encounter...
Re:mmhmmm (Score:5, Funny)
Re:mmhmmm (Score:4, Interesting)
Solar panels are great until they get dirty or worse damaged by micro-meteorites. Plus you might not have light 24/7 when you are on a large body like mars so you gotta add lots of batteries for your Solar panel setup unless you're ok with only breathing during the day...
Re:mmhmmm (Score:5, Funny)
...unless you're ok with only breathing during the day...
I don't know about you, but I SLEEP during the night. Sheesh, this isn't rocket surgery.
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Chances are, it'll already be on the moon and working before astronauts even get there. This is not the first nuclear-based energy source NASA has launched.
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Solar panels are limited by their distance from the Sun. Double the distance and you'll get only 1/4th the power. Head to the outer planets and you'll need a large collector to collect a lot of power.
For a nuclear reactor/Sterling Engine combo, the power output of 2.3KW seems awful low. Perhaps there should be two, one to back up other and to double the power output if needed.
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...after the rovers and the problems with keeping their solar panels cleared of dust...
If the panel isn't moving around, dust shouldn't be much of a problem on the moon. Although I've never visited, I understand that dust storms there are pretty infrequent.
That said, the long nights could be a real issue unless you're shipping a metric ass-load of batteries. Nuclear seems pretty reasonable.
But with all that He3, fusion should be just fine. Surely we'll have the kinks ironed out if we give ourselves 5-10 years, right? Or at least we can promise that we will so that we can secure funding?
Re:mmhmmm (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, Moon dust is a bigger problem on the than Mars dust exactly because there is no weather. Weathering wears down the rough edges of dust particles. Without it, the dust retains jagged edges. It is extremely abrasive, sticks to everything, and is electrically charged. Once it sticks to something, it is extremely difficult to get off. On Mars, however, you can just wipe the dust away. It's weathered and smooth, like the dust we are all familiar with on Earth.
http://www.wired.com/science/space/news/2005/04/67110
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080924191552.htm
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090421-st-moon-dust-sunangle.html
Re:mmhmmm (Score:5, Funny)
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How many Libraries of Congress is .85 of a fuck-ton?
Realistically, how much would it cost to get Congress onto a rocket bound for Sol?
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Could get difficult, politicians are extremely dense.
Re:mmhmmm (Score:5, Informative)
Since there is specifically zero atmosphere, the only dust you're going to get on the rover is something directly applying it via ballistic trajectory. That's pretty easy to prevent with simply placement slightly away from drive paths. A wind driven environment will *always* have more dust flying around than the moon. there isn't any atmosphere to push it so it just sits until something imparts energy to it.
That's an impressive and very persuasive bit of reasoning with only the minor flaw that it's entirely wrong from beginning to end. The fact is lunar dust is very pervasive, fine, and troublesome. Here's [space.com] an article about it.
Re:mmhmmm (Score:4, Informative)
You might kick some up, but unless the stuff is given a decent ballistic velocity it won't go anywhere. Can't exactly hang around in the air, right?
Actually, you couldn't be more wrong [nasa.gov].
The dust particles get a charge off the solar wind and sunlight itself, then repel one another. Result: Dust hanging about in the air (well, mainly lack of air actually).
Re:NUCLEAR IS NEVER THE ANSWER! (Score:4, Informative)
Thorium [technologyreview.com] reactors don't make plutonium. No need for a light water or breeder reactor for it. I'm told that the fission byproducts are an order of magnitude safer as well, but I haven't seen the math for it yet.
ALL CAPS IS NEVER THE ANSWER! (Score:5, Funny)
So send it up inactive? (Score:3, Interesting)
Why would you send the reactor up *activated*? The only part of the reactor that's really of any concern is the fuel - enriched uranium. So, maybe the answer is to send the uranium up in little bits, so that even if it *did* blow up, there's such a small amount of non-reacted fuel (I might be wrong, but if I understand the nuclear fuel cycle, it shouldn't be very dangerous if it hasn't been reacted yet, and there's not a sufficient quantity to start a reaction?)
Can someone who knows more comment on whether
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BUT NO!! LET'S START FROM SCRATCH, BREAK THE BUDGET RE-DESIGNING THE WHEEL AND TAKE TWENTY FIVE YEARS TO GET THERE INSTEAD OF THE TEN IT TOOK US IN THE 60'S
We try to be a bit more careful with our astronauts these days, few applicants are test pilots any more, we like getting people back safely. There is no cold war or space race driving us to take risks to achieve goals. When we lose people and equipment, we now take sufficient time to understand what went wrong and how to fix it. And the budget hasn't been broken so much as drasticly slashed by people who have no concept of the benefit of space exploration.
Re:For a start fine, but then - solar! (Score:5, Informative)
"which is ot that hard"
Okay, how?
Batteries are heavy and you have to lift them from Earth. Regolith has a pretty low specific heat capacity. Water works pretty well to store heat, or to make hydrogen, but on the moon you're probably not going to have much and you might want to drink it instead. You can compress gas to store energy, but where are you going to find that on the moon?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Okay, how?
During the day, lift heavy rocks upward. During the night, lower them.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If the American public will accept the safety assurances of NASA, then the Russians and the Chinese are going to raise HELL about the idea of having nuclear energy in space.
Um, the Russians have actually already launched quite a few nuclear reactors (not just RTGs, although they've launched plenty of those too):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOPAZ_nuclear_reactor [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Nuclear_power_in_space [wikipedia.org]
Heck, in the 1970s one of the Russian reactors disintegrated over Canada, and the Canadians billed Russia a few million dollars in cleanup costs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos_954 [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)