US Tests Nuclear Power System To Sustain Astronauts On Mars (reuters.com) 197
Initial tests in Nevada on a compact nuclear power system designed to sustain a long-duration NASA human mission on the inhospitable surface on Mars have been successful and a full-power run is scheduled for March, officials said on Thursday. Reuters reports: National Aeronautics and Space Administration and U.S. Department of Energy officials, at a Las Vegas news conference, detailed the development of the nuclear fission system under NASA's Kilopower project. Months-long testing began in November at the energy department's Nevada National Security Site, with an eye toward providing energy for future astronaut and robotic missions in space and on the surface of Mars, the moon or other solar system destinations. A key hurdle for any long-term colony on the surface of a planet or moon, as opposed to NASA's six short lunar surface visits from 1969 to 1972, is possessing a power source strong enough to sustain a base but small and light enough to allow for transport through space. NASA's prototype power system uses a uranium-235 reactor core roughly the size of a paper towel roll. The technology could power habitats and life-support systems, enable astronauts to mine resources, recharge rovers and run processing equipment to transform resources such as ice on the planet into oxygen, water and fuel. It could also potentially augment electrically powered spacecraft propulsion systems on missions to the outer planets.
No Alternatives??? (Score:5, Funny)
I don't understand why they can't use hydro, wind or solar. Does NASA have to subsidize Big Oil and the nuclear industry? Damn you Trump, Damn you! ;)
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They probably would have solar backup, at least enough to survive. Wouldn't want to rely on one technology or one unit when you are a year away from resupply...
The solar panels on the rovers had issues with dust, but for a permanent static installation that is solvable.
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They probably would have solar backup, at least enough to survive. Wouldn't want to rely on one technology or one unit when you are a year away from resupply...
The solar panels on the rovers had issues with dust, but for a permanent static installation that is solvable.
I wonder if the new Martians might dust them off?
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They probably would have solar backup, at least enough to survive. Wouldn't want to rely on one technology or one unit when you are a year away from resupply...The solar panels on the rovers had issues with dust, but for a permanent static installation that is solvable.
When a fission reactor cell is the about the size of a paper towel roll as stated by the summary, it's probably be easier to launch few spare cells than all of the extra weight of a redundant back-up solar panel system. Solar is tried, tested, and true in space applications, so the only logical reason to develop an alternative power source for a base is because solar is not feasible. Remember, the main limitation is launch weight/cost, and the energy per pound/cost is the main reason the fission reactor cel
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Re:No Alternatives??? (Score:4, Informative)
Not saying it's not viable, but they really will need to be frugal with power requirements if they went full solar for the first while. That said, 'why not both'.
Same for the moon. (Score:5, Informative)
And similar problems emerge for the Moon.
Yes, it is roughly the same distance from the sun as Earth is (given that the moon orbits around the later, duh...).
And yes, no significant atmosphere means even more light available to a moon base than to earth surface solar pannels...
But being tidally locked to earth and with a approx 28-day orbit around it means that the Moon base's solar panels are guaranteed to be in the dark for 2 whole weeks (unless you go even more crazy with orbital mirror reflecting light toward the solar panels, etc.)
Batteries could be a solution, adding a nuclear power source to supplement the solar specially during moon night is another.
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The most likely site for a Moon base is the South pole. There are crater rims there that are in permanent sunlight, which the crater bottoms are in permanent shadow (and appear to have significant quantities of moisture frozen out there.
All of which said, until you have in situ manufacturing, a compact fission reactor will give you a lot more power per ton hauled up from Earth.
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a compact fission reactor will give you a lot more power per ton hauled up from Earth
No, not really. The power per weight of small fission reactors is terrible (and so are your heat rejection options on the Moon).
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You will also need some pretty specialized workers servicing the reactor.
Not a problem. Example, the US Navy manages to train plenty of people to service nuclear power plants for its ships and submarines (Russians and Chinese got 'em too). and you're not sending untrained/untrainable people into space anyways.
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You will also need some pretty specialized workers servicing the reactor.
Not a problem. Example, the US Navy manages to train plenty of people to service nuclear power plants for its ships and submarines (Russians and Chinese got 'em too). and you're not sending untrained/untrainable people into space anyways.
So if I read you right, anyone can run a nuc reactor? Point is that if you have to have a specialist in one area, you lose one in another. Then number of people going is rather restrictive.
Anyhow, since I first posted, I've seen of this reactor is that it might not need a specialist. Seems to be set and forget. If it breaks there might be an issue. It apparently has a Stirling engine which I doubt is user serviceable. . So when it "runs out" it just sits there.
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So if I read you right, anyone can run a nuc reactor? Point is that if you have to have a specialist in one area, you lose one in another. Then number of people going is rather restrictive.
Can you design or build from scratch a TV or smartphone or computer or car?
Can you operate them?
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So if I read you right, anyone can run a nuc reactor? Point is that if you have to have a specialist in one area, you lose one in another. Then number of people going is rather restrictive.
Can you design or build from scratch a TV or smartphone or computer or car?
Can you operate them?
Good point, As Samsung has so ably shown, high energy dense devices can go boom. Hot stuff, flames, a fireworks show for hte masses. Now add to that a reactor with it's extra fun stuff spewing out.
Nuc submarines and ships are often brought up as how people can manage reactors. These guys and gals are higly trained, motivated - especially on the subs - and they are extremely bright. And unless things ahve changed, they don't work in the mess hall slinging slop.
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So what? I mean, it makes the return flight for passengers a bit more expensive, though still nothing compared to the cost of getting them there in the first place. (crap efficiency on a much lower-cost flight = still cheap)
Meanwhile most everything a moon base is producing (fuel, water, air, etc) will be for use in space, and most will never get closer to Earth than lunar orbit. So the real question is, how does the absolute increase in annual passenger costs to Earth compare to the absolute reduction i
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And you remind me that it get dark on Mars for 12 hours each day, so solar would require battery backup able to supply the 10's of kilowatts for half the day. And to provide battery backup for the weeks-long dust storms would be enormously heavier than the proposed nuclear reactor. Mars rovers can shutdown during storms and nights, people not so much.
The proposed reactor is designed to run for a decade or more. Do we have lithium batteries that can supply a daily charge cycle to provide daily 12 hours of 10
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As I mentioned, a major requirement for a martian base is going to be rocket propellant production, which is an activity that can work intermittently quite well. In addition, you could siphon off a little bit of the hydrogen for fuel cell usage. Chances are that the total mass of the system would be quite a bit lower than if you had to use a nuclear unit.
Yikes! Those are some pretty grim nummbers
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Indeed. Where reactors might be a boon though (outside of space probes, rovers, etc) is near the poles, where surface ice is plentiful, but sunlight may be far more intermittent. They'd also be quite handy as a secondary power supply during heavy dust storms.
Really though, it sounds like these are designed for research probes, which makes a lot more sense. 3kW is barely enough to be useful for a human outpost, but is quite a bit for a probe or rover. And I would guess the cost/watt is quite favorable to
Re:No Alternatives??? (Score:5, Informative)
Solar? Have you heard of Martian dust storms? Read on:
“Every year there are some moderately big dust storms that pop up on Mars and they cover continent-sized areas and last for weeks at a time,” said Michael Smith, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Beyond Mars’ large annual storms are massive storms that occur more rarely but are much larger and more intense.
“Once every three Mars years (about 5 ½ Earth years), on average, normal storms grow into planet-encircling dust storms, and we usually call those ‘global dust storms’ to distinguish them,” Smith said.
Mars’ dust storms aren’t totally innocuous, however. Individual dust particles on Mars are very small and slightly electrostatic, so they stick to the surfaces they contact like Styrofoam packing peanuts.
“If you’ve seen pictures of Curiosity after driving, it’s just filthy,” Smith said. “The dust coats everything and it’s gritty; it gets into mechanical things that move, like gears.”
The possibility of dust settling on and in machinery is a challenge for engineers designing equipment for Mars.
This dust is an especially big problem for solar panels. Even dust devils of only a few feet across -- which are much smaller than traditional storms -- can move enough dust to cover the equipment and decrease the amount of sunlight hitting the panels. Less sunlight means less energy created.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/g... [nasa.gov]
Re: No Alternatives??? (Score:3)
I'm pretty sure you missed his joke.
Either that or he's more retarded than I would think possible ...
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I heard they have some new containers for Solar. They hold a ton, but you need sunglasses to work with them.
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It's an engineering problem. You surely could get some combination of solar and battery to work on the Martian surface, but it would impose design and operational constraints -- constraints which could be mitigated with money.
Presumably they crunched the numbers and developing an entirely novel compact reactor looks like it could be a win. However lets imagine this "Kilopower" project is a total failure; that doesn't mean that a Mars habitation mission couldn't proceed, it'd just cost more to get a certain
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It's not as if this hasn't actually been studied. Solar with batteries is viable for some locations but not others, based on the maximum length storm. Nor is it necessarily either/or. PV gets you a lot more watts/dollar, so even if you had one of these you might well decide to use both.
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Wasn't there a Mars Rover that was operational 15 years (or something) past it's intended mission length because they expected the solar panels to become covered with dust, but it turned out that the wind actually kept the panels relatively clean?
Why wouldn't this apply to fixed solar panels? Especially if you have people there who can perform active maintenance/cleaning.
I would say that the issue with solar on Mars is the increased distance from the Sun. The same panels will produce significantly less powe
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The car sized 900kg Curiosity rovers used a Plutonium RTG as it's main power source.
Although the smaller 180kg Spirit and Opportunity rovers used solar panels for main power, the panels could only supply a peak of 140watts for about 4 hours per sol (martian day) when there wasn't a dust storm.
What is apparently not as well known is that even Spirit and Opportunity still used RHU (Radioisotope Heating Units) to keep warm at night to augment their batteries (as nearly all deep space missions have done).
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Rolled solar panels are remarkably thin and lightweight. You'd just need either a person or machine on the surface to unroll them, stack some rocks around the edges, and wire them up via a shared bus to an inverter/battery charge controller/*.
The primary disadvantage, at least in my view, is that the output power per square foot when deployed is minimal, which means if you're building a device that needs to move around much (e.g. bots that build structures, do mining, etc.), you're going to have to consta
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Well, while the obvious jokes about hydro and wind made me laugh, the solar one is at least half-way serious. Just thinking about the Moon, the answer is obviously that the 336-hour nights would make solar kind of tricky.
In the case of Mars, though, I thought it was interesting that one of the theories behind the short lifespan of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers was that dust would form on the solar panels and the rovers would die within 90 days. Turned out that the breeze and dust-devils kept the solar
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With nuclear, you still have to blow dust off the cooling towers.
A dusty cooling tower will do its job a helluva lot better than a dusty solar panel.
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The reactor is NOT cooled, per se. Instead, the SMALL reactors heat is used to heat a working fluid/gas, which in this case is He (not steam). That will drive the stirling engines. From there, the heat is dumped into equipment, rooms, etc. IOW, little to none of it will be wasted.
Yes, that's why nuclear power plants don't have cooling towers, they're actually called dumping towers. /s
Your lack of knowledge of nuclear power, power as a whole, radiation, heat transfer, etc combined with your constant whining about ANYTHING have to do with nuclear power is amazing.
Uh...my nuclear faculty begs to differ.
And here you are complaining about kilopower when you have NOT A SINGLE CLUE of how it works. Let me clue you in:
I knew all these things years ago. This idea is not novel.
5) in a month, they exchange the fuel, and simple get rid of the old u-235 core. They can dump it in any crater that they want. It is not like it will melt down, or that waste radiation will harm anybody.
Now THIS you are pulling out of your ass. How do you "[simply] get rid of the old u-235 core"? It's connected to the generators using liquid metal loops. We can't even do that properly on Earth with lots of qualified humans around, and you want to roboticize the process? With reattachment of another working
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Only, you really don't have wind power. Due to the much lower atmospheric pressure (0.6%), a 400mph Martian gale-force wind will hit you with all the force of a very light (3mph) breeze here on Earth. So there just isn't really much power to be extracted.
On the up side, that means that something like an inflatable greenhouse will have no problem withstanding the force of even the worst Martian storms. On the down side, sandblasting is still a problem. The wind might not have any force behind it, but the
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At 20k USD per kg to LEO 40-50KW of solar gets pretty expensive. We know how to make reactors that last a long time and survive reentry and other mishaps.
No radiation involved (Score:2)
That would be true of the radiothermal devices often used in many satellites and rovers, which use the heat from the decay of fairly radioactive elements to generate electricity. But this is a fission reactor, not a radiothermal generator.
The thing with fission fuel is, generally speaking, it's not particularly radioactive. You could eat it, and the heavy metal poisoning would kill you before the radiation did. U-235 for example has a half-life of 703.8 million years (longer=less radioactive) - common ca
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The benefit of nuclear is that it doesn't care if you haven't seen the sun for two months because of a regularly scheduled global dust storm. Which would potentially be a problem for orbital power as well.
Orbital solar is a nice idea, but nobody has figured out how to get the power down to the surface yet. We've done experiments that have managed fairly efficient wireless power transmission over a few tens of miles, but to get from a "stationary" satellite to the surface of Mars is 12,693 miles - we nee
NASA project: Kilopower (Score:5, Informative)
There are more information about the Kilopower project at NASA: https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/kilopower [nasa.gov]
Coolant (Score:2)
I'd be curious to see how they plan on cooling the thing. Yes there's lots of ice at the poles, but is there enough water anywhere else to be useable to cool the thing?
Re:Coolant (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not massively powerful, we're talking kilowatts, not megawatts here. Think of the amount of heat that a radiator of a car engine deals with, if that's any help. Possibly might be able to get away with radiators.
Or that waste heat can be used for habitat heating, or you can just bury some pipes and sink that heat into the ground. Might be handy to melt local subsurface ice with perhaps.
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Or think about the amount of heat a fridge is radiating from its back.
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A car radiator is not really radiating much, it needs airflow. That's why it has a fan.
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1 KW is about what you'd need to run a popup toaster or a blow dryer. This is, from a NASA engineer's perspective, a huge amount of power, but you couldn't run your neighborhood hair salon on it.
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1 KW is about what you'd need to run a popup toaster or a blow dryer. This is, from a NASA engineer's perspective, a huge amount of power, but you couldn't run your neighborhood hair salon on it.
But on a Base station perspective, it is pretty lean. My Emergency Generator is 3 KW and it runs my place, but I have to be careful about the induction motors in the fridge and freezer. There is also the furnace. If all three kick on at the same time, or just the Fridge and Freezer, it will stall the generator. Only lasts for a second ot two of high current draw, but that's enough. And that is just one energy efficient house., not a base.
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This is pretty much a solved problem. Modern inverter generators are starting to deal with surge demand by dipping into their starter batteries. Modern inverters can do gen boost much the same by dipping into batteries and/or supercaps. Even back before all this replacing the bare min to not melt the wires caps that most manufacturers use with better starting caps you can get a 13.5k btu roof ac to start on a 2kw gen set.
Re: Coolant (Score:2)
Nobody suggested using the atmosphere for cooling; read what the other guy wrote. You're going to need to heat your habitat. You're going to need to heat up water. On a planet which averages -55 degrees, there's really no such thing as "waste heat"; all of it is useful.
It's passively cooled (Score:5, Informative)
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You could load it in your bass boat and then circumnavigate the world on your trolling motor -- if it were a small trolling motor.
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You could stick it in your electric car and have a year-long cross country police chase!
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(I wish slashdot had an edit button)
The return of the Ford Nucleon [wikipedia.org]!
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That was before they knew that nuclear powered cars wouldn't use reactors but by Mr. Fusion [wikia.com]!
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Wouldn't be very exciting in a 1.3 horsepower car.
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Seems really light on details considering a tested prototype. Didn't see any real details in article or in the NASA pages.
Would kind of like to know exactly how much power is generated and how long the fuel lasts, how much it weighs. About all it says like the name suggests that it will be in the range of kilowatts, and could possibly be scaled up to hundreds of kilowatts, maybe, or used in multiple reactor configurations. They say it "could" run between 1-10kw and "up to" 10 years. The presentation seems t
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Here's a NASA video that offers some detail on the setup.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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>> I'd be curious to see how they plan on cooling the thing.
The reactor heat is transferred to the stirling engine hot ends via heat pipes. The Stirling engine cold end is connected to a large heat radiator by additional heat pipes.
For scale, the unit has an adjustable output of 1-10KW. A decent gaming PC consumes about 1 KW. A good hairdryer is 1.5kw. Dumping that amount of heat into the martian atmosphere is not a difficult engineering challenge. For comparison, the two RTGs on the curiosity ro
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As others have said, this is a tiny reactor where cooling is unlikely to be much of an issue. Even for something larger though, say they wanted a multi-megawatt reactor that could actually power a small colony - the answer is "yes"
There's massive quantities of water on Mars - the polar ice caps just for starters, but also lots of subsurface ice and potentially even briny liquid. But you don't need to consume water for cooling - that's just what we do here because boiling water and dumping the steam into
Stationary Thorium Reactor (Score:5, Interesting)
Turns out Mars has significant amounts of Thorium, particularly near a latitude recently found to have significant amounts of ice. The ice could be melted by and cool a thorium reactor, and electrolyzed to produce rocket fuel. There's plenty of open space on Mars to put a thorium reactor without any NIMBYs nearby worrying about strong gamma emitters or long-lived nuclear waste contaminating the environment. We could drop a few centrifuges on the planet and run them on solar for years, slowly accumulating usable fissile material before the first astronauts touch down. Of course some infrastructure to load them up would be required... but there's almost certainly going to be a need, for one reason or another, for some type of heavy backhoe drone moving soil around anyway (digging out a pit for a sub-surface habitat, getting to ice deposits, flattening landing zones, etc.)
Of course, by the time NASA gets their ass to Mars, we'll already have fusion reactors.
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although for colonization that approach could make sense (bootstrapping your infrastructure from local materials), as a practical matter it's
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You'd need significant industrial capability -- which translates into literally tons of mass -- to bootstrap that scenario. Mining equipment is not light.
It's one of those scenarios that's easy to imagine working once you got it up and running, but is hard to image how to get up and running.
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Right. The mass of a backhoe is almost equal to the GTO capacity of a Falcon Heavy, and ~7x the mass of Curiosity. So, it'd need to be scaled down, or dropped in pieces and reassembled after it lands. Some kind of assembly infrastructure would be required anyways in order to assemble/position the reactor, connect wires etc.
Not saying it'll be easy, just required for a self-sufficient colony. All this stuff can be built/tested/iterated on Earth, and be beneficial here too. Imagine NASA licensing tech to Cate
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There's a lot of things we could do on Mars that'd be experimental, but for the initial trip it will be tested technology and methods which we're fairly sure will work.
Growing food on Mars? Experiment. Canned food? Will work.
Gathering water from ice on Mars? Experiment. Bringing water? Will work.
Producing fuel on Mars? Experiment. Bring fuel? Will work.
Mining on Mars? Experiment. Bring a self-contained RTG? Will work.
Of course, by the time NASA gets their ass to Mars, we'll already have fusion reactors.
I'd flip that around, by the time we have fusion reactors we'll already have a Mars colony.
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This is an awfully confused post.
Centrifuges are used for enriching uranium. They have nothing to do with any thorium fuel cycle.
We can ship nuclear fuel from Earth quite easily. Due to the high energy density, it is not heavy. The idea of mining nuclear fuel on Mars , and processing it and manufacturing the fuel to the necessary quality standards makes not sense at all.
Thorium seems to have acquired a fandom that imbues it with quasi-magical properties. It is doubly magical if the word "salt" is also used.
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The "run then on solar for years" part is kind of pie-in-the-sky. We don't have fully automated mines even on Earth, and we've barely even started using electrical mining equipment. The practicality of running a mining system entirely on solar power just isn't there. It would take tremendous amounts of energy to actually mine the
Neighborhood (Score:2)
The first few will be expensive, so we probably want to wait for the second wave when they go into mass production
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>Where can my neighborhood association go to signup for one of these?
Toshiba: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Uranium 235 the size of a paper towel roll? (Score:2)
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That's what is in a nuclear bomb.
Ok, sure. But a bomb takes a lot more than just that to make it go boom.
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Ok, sure. But a bomb takes a lot more than just that to make it go boom.
Not much more for a U235 gun-type bomb: just slamming two sub-critical parts together with explosives will do it.
If you can obtain the highly enriched uranium, the rest is easy.
The Hiroshima bomb was of this type and they were so confident it was not tested before being used.
Most nuclear weapons use implosion of a plutonium core, which is far more difficult.
rest is easy? (Score:2)
Easy?
I call Bullcrap
better take two! (Score:2)
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then you move the SPOF inside the unit (or some desk jockey will increase the power draw)
with two units if one goes bad you can then yank the running unit off the port and replace it (if you want to get wrench monkey simple)
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even if its swap from Cable 22A to Cable 22B my point still stands redundant should be in separate units.
Greatest example of Military Intelligence: I give you the M18 Claymore Mine written on the front is the words
"FRONT TOWARDS ENEMY"
fun fact the M18 design is also used in 15 other countries including the labeling.
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Only a temporary crutch (Score:2)
If humans are going to stay on Mars any length of time, they'll have to develop Martian power systems, not depend on hot boxes from Earth. Doesn't matter if it's solar, wind, chemical, or nuclear, Mars will need to generate its own power. Power and water. After that, you're on your own.
SPECS !? news for nerds .. (Score:3)
A compact, low cost, fission reactor for exploration and science, scalable from 1 kW to 10 kW electric
Novel integration of available U-235 fuel form, passive sodium heat pipes, and flight-ready Stirling convertors
Would provide about 10x more power than the Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator
some perspective :
Power systems used on previous robotic missions (e.g. Spirit/Opportunity, Phoenix, Curiosity) do not provide sufficient power: all less than 200 W
source (with pictures!) : https://www.nasa.gov/sites/def... [nasa.gov]
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Uranium does not need water for working electricity. Like all heat engines, what is required is a place to dump the waste heat - to keep the cold end cold (relatively speaking). On Earth, that is efficiently done with evaporative cooling, but that's hardly the only way. How much water does a household Honda generator require? The nuclear sources on the Voyager space probes radiated heat d
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So without a proper explanation of how this reactor works, people would assume water is used to turn a turbine (or piston in this case)
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The article has a perfectly good explanation of how this reactor works: the heat drives a Stirling engine. If "people" don't know what a Stirling engine is or how it works, there is Wikipedia (as you linked). If "people" erroneously assume that a Stirling engine requires water, well, I'm not going to spare a lot of sympathy, especially when respo
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RTGs are radioactive. Nuclear fuel is not.
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Everyone knows potatoes draw their power from the souls they devour, and there just aren't going to be enough people on Mars for that to work for quite some time.
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You should probably let them know that they forgot those things.
Do it quick, before they leave without them.
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Every time I see a phrase like "Repuke" or "Dumbocrat", I realize I'm speaking with a moron. It's a nice indicator, sort of like a giant hat that tells me "Nothing this person says is of importance". It leaves my brain with more space and time to ponder important things, like cat videos.