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Nuclear Booster Rockets
Logic Bomb writes: "According to the New Scientist, NASA would like to explore replacing its chemical-based booster rockets with nuclear versions. Engineers think it could be the first step towards major reductions in launch costs that would eventually lead to widespread public access to space. NASA is aware that such a project faces massive PR difficulties. As a non-expert member of the public, I can verify that. :-)"
A similar plan bounced around in the US Air Force in the 1950s for both a manned and unmanned nuclear bomber.
t m
The bomber in the 50s, had the reactor core dropped into the exhaust of the jet engines. It looks alot like the picture from the article.
There was a B-36H test bed that had a reactor in it as well.
http://www.brook.edu/FP/projects/nucwcost/anp.h
The B-36H didn't use the reactor for power but to test the effects of a reactor on an airframe. Flying alongside the NB-36H on every one of its flights was a C-97 transport carrying a platoon of armed Marines ready to parachute down and surround the test aircraft in case it crashed.
"One idea for an operational nuclear-powered aircraft involved detachable reactor modules that could be replaced as needed. In this artist's conception, the pilots were in the section forming part of the tail, which could be detached in cases of emergency."
Theres more on the percived atomic powered bomber programs of the US and USSR over on the Federation of American Scientists website. Not much but some.
There was a big writeup on it in the Air and Space magazine in the early 90s...I have the issue somewhere.
http://www.fas.org/nuke/space/c03anp.htm
Where are the Thalidomide kids from the Japanese bombings?
s k/ risks90.html
There arn't any.
http://rex.nci.nih.gov/NCI_Pub_Interface/rateri
"Much of our information about the effects of radiation comes from studies of atomic bomb survivors in Japan, among whom have been found increased rates of leukemia and cancers of the breast, thyroid, lung, stomach, and other organs (NAS, 1990). Female survivors who received a single dose of radiation from the blast were found to be at the same risk for breast cancer as women with tuberculosis who had repeated fluoroscopy exposures over a 3- to 5-year period. This suggests that in the case of breast cancer--but not necessarily other cancers--repeated small doses over the years may be as hazardous as a single, large dose. The risk, however, seemed to be inversely correlated to the age at exposure to the blast, with no apparent increased risk in women over the age of 40."
"While exposure to low levels of radiation before birth is associated with the development of cancer during childhood, especially leukemia (Bithell and Stewart, 1975), not all researchers are convinced that prenatal irradiation is the cause of childhood cancer. Individuals exposed prenatally during the atomic bomb blasts in Japan do not have higher cancer rates. The current practice is to use ultrasound, rather than X-rays, during pregnancy whenever possible."
http://www.junkscience.com/foxnews/fn020201.htm
"Scientists agree that exposures to sufficiently high levels of radiation increase cancer risk -- slightly. Among the more than 86,000 survivors of the atomic bomb blasts, "only" about 420 "extra" cancers occurred between 1950-1990. "
I think that Oil gives you Los Angeles, but Anti-Nuclear propoganda gives you bad information.
I'm sorry. But the idea that dropping the bombs wasn't right because the Japanese would have rolled over and surrendered without invastion or bombing is "Revisionist Propaganda".
And while we are far, far off topic from NASA using nuclear power for rockets...I'm going to respond.
Based on the experiances of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the Allies (United States, UK, Commonwealth, Royal Dutch forces) knew that the two phase invasion of Japan would cause hundreds of thousands of Allied and perhaps a million Japanese casualties. With a combined American air bombardment and naval blockade, Japan had been defeated by the summer of 1945, if not earlier. But even in defeat the Japanese Army intended to fight in defense of the homeland. The Japanese Army was stockpilling weapons, aircraft and ships to oppose the fall invasion of the South. The Allies had about 1.4 million troops in the Pacific to oppose 5-6 million Imperial Japanese Army forces in the Japanese home islands.
US Army estimates for the invasion of Kynushu that of 767,000 allied troops...268,000 would be killed or wounded. Olympic, the invasion of Kynushu was going to be in the Fall of '45 with operation Coronet, the invasion of Honshu in March of '46. The conventional bombing of Japan had not weakened Japan's will to wage war.
http://www.warships1.com/US_olympic.htm
http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/arens/
"We must be prepared to accept heavy casualties whenever we invade Japan. Our previous success against ill-fed and poorly supplied units, cut down by our overpowering naval and air action, should not be used as the sole basis of estimating the type of resistance we will meet in the Japanese homeland where the enemy lines of communication will be short and the enemy supplies more adequate."
Although the damage inflicted by the Kamikaze planes at Okinawa was superficial, they managed to kill 12,300 American servicemen and wound 36,400. For the defense of Kyushu the Japanese were to employ upwards of 10,000 kamikaze planes.
I stand by my claim that the use of nuclear weapons in *SOME* situtations will cause less military and civilian casualties that conventional weapons used in the same theatre or operation.
> they need a powerful reactor. They energy
> density must be far higher than the reactors
> currently in use. There was a project in the
> 1960'ies, and they came to the conclusion that
> they need a 2000-3000 times higher energy
> density.
THIS IS COMPLETELY FALSE. I am shouting because you are absolutely nuts. The power densities (energy density is *not* the right term) of NERVA reactors that were actually built and tested in the '60s are *multiple* orders of magnitude higher than power reactors used for electricity production. Ballpark: 1000 times higher! They have existing designs which are powerful enough to be useful for upper stages right now. Primary booster designs are about one more order of magnitude larger and perfectly feasible.
> they need a conventional booster for
> the first 30000 feet...
Not if they simply provide the ram rocket (that's the correct term for the design which the article describes) with oxidizer and integral combustors for early acceleration. Then the hybrid design would be chemically powered at lift off, but nuclear powered the rest of the way. It need not use a separate booster, but could be a an SSTO (single-stage-
to-orbit).
> the reactor must
> withstand an explosion of the conventional
> booster
This isn't very difficult for the designs which are likely to be tried. Early graphite designs would break up and release radioactivity easily, but it sounds (from the uranium dioxide reference) like they will be making the fuel elements from a tungsten-UO2 cermet. This stuff is *really* hard, dense and tough. You would be surprised at how little a chemical explosion might do to it.
Furthermore, it is important to understand that nuclear fuel is only *very slightly* radioactive until the reactor is powered up and fission products are produced. A wrecked *fresh* core below 30 000 feet represents a near-zero hazard.
> they must convince the public that
> the radioactive traces that are released in
> the upper atmosphere are negligable.
This is going to be a political problem, not a scientific problem. It is important to understand that the thickness of the atmosphere makes a *really* good radiation shield. Radionuclides in the stratosphere may be released and emit gamma rays, but almost *none* of the gammas will reach the ground. You should realize that there are something like 7 (metric) tons of air over every square meter between you and the stratosphere!
Stratospheric fallout is perhaps hundreds of times less threatening to the environment than tropospheric fallout. There's no rain up there. In the troposphere, rainout is the primary means that radioactivity will reach the ground - in a few days. But with no rainout, finely-divided stratospheric fallout remains aloft - and on the preferable side of that 7t/sq.m shield - for months. Fission products are mostly short lived, and a tremendous amount of decay occurs before they will reach the ground.
Furthermore, the amounts normally released are likely to be very small - because of that tungsten-UO2 cermet again. The UO2 particles in the cermet will do a tremendous job of retaining fission products, and the fuel elements should be cladded with plain tungsten or a similar metal or alloy.
-- Mike Greaves
I'm scared of radiation because it does horrible things. It caused Braniac's head to grow and he couldn't even find a toupee after all his hair fell out. It made Dr. Octopus turn evil. It ruined Mr. Fantastic's sex life and made the Thing the fondest desire of all women everywhere. It was even responsible for the spider that bit Peter Parker and ruined his self-centered little life. Worst of all, it created the incredible Hulk, who is still roaming around the southwest wreaking havoc at great expense to the taxpayers.
Given this history, I think its perfectly reasonable to be scared of Nuclear anything, and especially of what will happen when a Nuclear Reactor is exposed to cosmic rays above the stratosphere. We JUST DON'T KNOW what will happen under these conditions!
--
-- Slashdot sucks.
(Disclaimer: this comes from an advocate of nuclear power. Add the appropriate block of salt.)
I've often wondered if your average anti-nuclear activist actually understands the physics involved. I'm not flaming, I'm genuinely curious. Through the media, I've seen many protests over the most trivial and safe use of nuclear technology (the Cassini launch comes to mind) but in all those news reports I've never seen an activist give a solid technical reason why they oppose nuclear power. Is that subtle filtering on the part of the media, or are these people genuinely clueless?
That's absurd! Thousands of people die every year from toxic coal waste (a good amount of which is released into the air, despite a complex filtering system).
Very, very true, and I thank you for bringing it up. In fact, less than a thousand kilometers from where I live, there's one of the world's worst coal-related toxin sites. Do a search for "Cape Breton tar ponds" in any search engine and you'll find tons of news reports on this problem.
The Sierra Club has put together a horrifying report on this site. By an astonishing coincedence, this place also has the highest cancer rate in Canada. Hmm.
And this is Canada, supposedly a bastion of environmental friendliness. Can any of you imagine what the situation might be like in countries where the local government doesn't care at all about the environment and doesn't have to be accountable to citizen's health concerns?
I'll be the first to admit that nuclear isn't a perfect solution, but stories like the Sydney tar ponds are what make me realize just how much more horrible fossil fuels can be. Nuclear waste may be more dangerous per mass unit, but at least there's a lot less of it.
What really matters, in terms of reducing costs to orbit?
I think you have correctly identified that it is *not* necessarily ISP or payload ratio.
One answer is that the thing that needs to be minimized, is *complexity*. Sometimes it is stated with pride that the Space Shuttle is the most complex machine ever built. To me, that is a statement of utter failure. To be inexpensive and reliable, a spacecraft should *not* be the most complex machine every built. Duh.
Chernobyl was poorly built, unsafe procedures, etc...in other words, a bad example of how to build a nuclear power plant. There's plenty of other nuclear plants in the world that don't make these mistakes. Don't blame the concept of nuclear power for Chernobyl...it wasn't the atoms' fault.
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
Because stupid people can't get the images of mushroom clouds and Chernobyl stuff out of their heads. Just like when someone hears you work with computers, they think you're an expert with anything that contains wires.
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
No. Remember: when you spray a little oil over a town, the dirt gets sticky, everything gets kinda blackened, and maybe you get a few random fires, but that's about it. When you spray radioactive material all over a town, not even that much happenes -- that you can tell right away. Then, a generation later, everybody starts looking like Thalidomide kids, and all the people who've lived there for 30 years have leukemia or tumors, and all the plants and animals start looking really twisted.
Oil gives you Los Angeles. Radiation gives you Lovecraft.
Oh, go on, check out my job.
It's sad that even the term nuclear had been so villified in the United States. Environmentalist groups did their best to kill American nuclear power in the 70's and 80's - unwittingly allowing for more and more pollution from smog-emitting coal plants and inefficient natural gas plants. Good luck on NASA pushing nuclear rockets through - look at the trouble they had with the Cassini probe.
Considering that in 1993 then Vice President Al Gore killed both the lithium breeder and fuel pellet nuclear designs after tests showed them to be excellent energy producers and perfectly safe against radiation release, it's clear that the American attitude to anything with "nuclear" in the title is based off irrational fears and half-truths.
Breaking through this ignorance barrier is going to harder for NASA than sending a man to the Moon...
Tell that to an ICBM warhead designer. True, they don't enter "unexpectedly" but they certainly come in at high velocity, are quite small, and protect their radioactive contents.
I am sure one can protect these devices. The question is whether one can build adequate protections within the weight budget and form factor requirements.
The only good weather is bad weather.
Too many people seem to believe that *any* radioactivity is too much. That is a naive viewpoint - you can't escape radiation. Fly in a commercial airliner - you get plenty of ionizing radiation compared to sitting on the ground.
So the issue, *assuming accident*, is how bad would it be, and how does it compare to other technologies and activities.
As far as nuclear testing in the atmosphere.. you are dead wrong about your parenthetical comment. The most dirty test is one on or near the ground. Air bursts release less radioactivity and distribute it much better.
The only good weather is bad weather.
The biggest real issue is whether the reactor contents could be adequately contained during a worst case accident. If this is possible, and I suspect it is, there is no real danger associated with this technology.
OTOH, the biggest practical issue is whether anti-nuclear hysteria will stop this thing because of the neglible amount of radiation produced at high altitudes when it fires. I am sure that too many people are happier with the amounts of CO2, toxic gases and (at higher altitudes) ozone depletion that is caused by current rocketry than they would be with the pospect of any tiny amount of the dreaded r a d i a t i o n products released into the stratosphere. Perhaps they fear mutation in the UFO's ;-)
Certainly in the US, where most people are innumerate and don't know physics, and Europe, where too many people are ecophobes, this will be the biggest problem.
The only good weather is bad weather.
concerning the PR aspect. Let's tell NASA to shut everything down for a year, put the money from their budget into a trust fund, then bring them back online, and then force the entire motherfucking population to go through engineering school. Once the stupid is beaten out of them, they'll be less likely to argue about nukyooler things being bad and more likely to support silly things like, I dunno, making sure people have a way off the planet in case everything shits the bed. Anyone? Agree/disagree?
Peace,
Amit
ICQ 77863057
[o]_O
if the first use of Oil was as a weapon, would we have the same sort of public fear over the resource?
The talk about nuclear energy is due to the rise in oil prices and skyrocketing prices of power in California. According to Bush, all we need are more electric wires.
Fight Spammers!
Nice post.
I think it is really funny how so many folks on this board characterize others concerned about the abuses (not uses, abuses) of nuclear energy technology universally as lobotomized hippies.
My sincerest apologies to any lobotomized hippies out there offended by this statement.
Anyways. I lived in a community situated near an active nuclear facility for several years. In that time, we learned A LOT about the people who run the plants and deal with the waste (and the waste IS dangerous folks). None of us were what you would call "environmentalists" "elitists" or "granola eating tree huggers". It was a farming community, and that is about as conservative as it gets. And, before you get your knickers in a bunch over how farmers aren't engineers, please understand that you actually need more than half a brain to be a successful farmer or rancher, and I have met plenty of engineers who could be called half-wits (and so have you, probably).
My apologies to any wholly-witted engineers out there. You know who you are, and wouldn't be offended by what I said. You know the guy in the cube next to you is a moron anyways.
First thing we learned is that the waste gets everywhere, at least in small doses. We found that the frogs near the plant were mutated after about 5 years of operation. Most of them ended up looking like giant tadpoles when fully grown. This is the same water that some of the local ranchers used on occasion for watering their herds, and the same water that was used for a recreational boating area. yech.
Second thing is, we found out that the people who run these operations LIE. They lie all the time. Never had an "incident" they said, never once had an accident. An independent investigation (independent of the NRC, too) found that there was at least one occasion where the reactor pools had cracked and leaked into the water table, as well as other incidents of spillage outside of that event. See frogs above. However, this was never classified as an "incident".
The third thing is that the numbers for the profit of producing power never matched up to the anticipated output. Yeah, if it runs at full burn for a year, it could pay itself off we were told. Riiight. Any farmer can tell you about supply and demand. Supply too much power, it becomes too cheap to sell. So our community had subsidized this leaking boondoggle that only ran something like 2 weeks out of the year. The rest of the time, we were buying expensive power from elsewhere, and still paying out taxes on the bonds that never got paid off from "all that cheapo power".
So lets review here, folks. One, dangerous waste. Two, an industry run by lying snakes (apologies to all honest snakes, snake dealers, and snake oil salespeople out there). Three, under less than perfect or ideal situations, a power source that is more expensive and destructive to maintain than to run under real world situations (ok, real world- most folks are average...they want to go home at 5pm, and bounce their kids around, and have a beer. They are concerned about having a good track record and paying their mortgage more than something amorphous as concern for their community or their fellow man- er, humans. This affects quality of labor and output of goods and services. Nothing ideal works well under those situations, and mistakes and problems always occur.).
Don't know about most of the folks here, but after first hand experience of having lived near one of those damned silos, the community in general decided we were better off shutting it down. It is not that it COULD work, because we knew it could, given the right care and effort. It is that the people who are the ones that need to care and put out effort aren't the ones running it. They rarely will be - that is just the nature of people, most of whom rarely if ever try to succeed beyond the average of the norm.
So while many folks here will sit back and quote neatly packaged facts and figures, please remember that it is a messy and disorganized world out there...and that maybe sometimes there are good reasons why people oppose "logical and rational" choices, such as the widespread use of nuclear power.
mrgoat
'Hail Eris, baby, hail Eris...pfffffffttt.' *cough* 'Yeah.'
Why is everybody in this country (USA) so against
nuclear power? We insist on using fossil fuels, then complain that we are producing 2 much pollution. But heaven forbid we allow for nuclear energy! Its cleaner than fossil fuel, safer, lasts longer... So honestly, why does the public of our country dislike the idea of a nuclear powerplant so much?
Let's look at some of the claims in the article:
"Nuclear systems give you a chance to reduce your mass and so your overall costs to orbit," Adams says.
This is a missile-builder talking. He's clearly obsessed with one particular engineering measure of "goodness", which is called "ISP". There has been any amount of research in the last twenty to thirty years that shows that maximizing ISP does not necessarily reduce costs. If NASA's current rockets were operating at the lower end of what you can do with chemical engines then he might be correct, but they are in fact several orders of magnitude off.
Nuclear propulsion could allow single-stage rockets to reach orbit - cutting the need for expendable boosters and allowing what he calls "airline-like" access to space.
Chemical propulsion allows single-stage to orbit, if you do it correctly. In fact, NASA has already built several rockets capable of single-stage to orbit operation, but they just haven't used them that way. The second stage of the Saturn V was one of them. Launched by itself, it would have been capable of making orbit with a small payload. It had the necessary ratio of fuel to total mass.
It would also be lighter and be able to lift a bigger fraction of its starting mass into orbit - perhaps as much as 45 per cent. "With existing systems, it's more like 10 per cent," he says.
This is true, but it DOES NOT MATTER. The 90% of the mass that doesn't make it to orbit is fuel. Fuel is very cheap. The current Space Shuttle uses something like $20 million dollars of fuel to get to orbit (and the vast majority of that is the solid rockets, not the hydrogen). The total cost of a Shuttle mission is more like $1000 million. Even if you could make the fuel free it wouldn't make the shuttle any cheaper.
What is important to cheap access to space is to make the vehicles *totally* reusable, like an airliner, not throw-away like a missile. The Shuttle is partially reusable, but it still throws away a huge amount of itself each flight, and has to be totally refurbished -- a process that takes months. Space flight won't be cheap until you can fly, come back down, fill-her-up, and fly again the next day.
Even if that means that 98% of what you leave the ground with is fuel it doesn't matter until you've got total costs down to well under a tenth of what they are today, and maybe closer to a hundredth.
If you're interested in this then I highly recommend that you go and read what the Space Access Society has been writing about this stuff for more than five years now.
While I agree with you on nuclear power (here in Ontario they closed down the fission plants and switched back to fossil fuels, the psycho bastards) I have to point out that this is a different issue. The risk with nuclear power is the radioactive waste, the high cost of running a plant, and the risk of accident. Here, the issues are different. Here, the only issue is safety, as this promises to be cheaper, and waste can be jettisoned on an outward decaying orbit.
The risk with Cassini is that an accident on the launch could result in widespread nuclear fallout - the technology their talking about here has the same risk, plus that its less tested and therefore people don't trust its ability not to blow up. And call me paranoid eco-psycho, but widespread fallout sucks bigtime.
Of course, then there were those complete morons who were worried that Cassini would crash land on its Earth slingshot flyby that it makes later on. Umm, earth is a goddamn small target, and its not coming within a million miles of the surface.
Read the article - its not actually nuclear propulsion - its not spraying radioactive material into space, its just using a reactor to superheat normal gasses and use the pressure for thrust.
THis is different from the Footfall thruster though. Footfall was just nukes going off under the ship's ass. This rocket is just using a reactor to superheat gas and release use the superhot gas for thrust - no radioactive material is released. I think.
Okay, lets assume you didn't say Africa and actually picked a place with low (or zero) population, rather then people you just didn't care about - its still risky. First, if it explodes on take off, we're probably not too bad off, but its no fun - remember that volcano a bit back, that resulted in a cold summer? That spread ash over the sky world wide. This explosion wouldn't even be close, but it could still spread the nuclear fuel over a fairly wide area, and some of it could reach the first world (especially if we made our launch site the middle of the Nevada desert or something).
Second is the nastier possibility - high atmosphere fuck-up. These are more rare, like the Ariane 5 prototype and, to a lesser extent, the Challenger (the challenger didn't get that high). There, the ship has made it a long distance and is no longer near the launch site, and could be over civilization. Also, the high atmosphere explosion means that it will take much longer to land, giving the fallout time to spread worldwide. In that case, it doesn't matter where on earth you are, you're still gene-fucked.
Of course, I don't know how much they're using, how risky it is, how bad things could be if it went up exactly. This is simply explaining people's fears. Personally, I'm all for this tech, I think its important to the future of humanity, and could finally get us into orbit. Still, the enviro's are right, this is risky as hell, and even the best rockets have been known to blow up, so I'm not sure if I want this going on.
This all boils down to the usual arguments for and against fission as a power source, weighed on one side by the tendency of rockets to explode on the lanch pad. I would argue against on the grounds of contamination risks, waste storage issues, proliferation (hard to control access to weapons material when you're creating so much of the precusors), and hidden costs.
That last one is the killer. If nuclear power had ever been nearly as cost effective as it was supposed to be, people would have dealt with or lived with the health and safety problems. But controlled fission is just one of those things that looks a lot simpler on paper than it does in practice. That's what killed it, despite the convenience of blaming everything on kneejerk treehuggers who arrive at the anti-nuke rally in smog-belching busses.
Hey, there's plenty of kneejerking on both sides. If I hear that stupid -- and simply untrue -- cliche about Ted Kennedy's car one more time...
__
The radioisotope thermal generators used in Cassini and other missions are AMAZINGLY tough. They are designed to survive a re-entry. Mostly, anyway... the re-entry scenario is the RTG landing almost intact, with the radioactive material spread out over a very small area near the impact site. Like, meters, not miles. (When I worked at JPL I got to look at a lot of the documentation, even though I worked in a different section. Neat stuff.)
An explosion on the pad, or in boost, would be a lot less stress on the RTG than re-entry. Think about the Challenger explosion: the crew were thought to be alive in the nose section until impact with the ocean. If there was an RTG in that area of the ship, it would have easily survived.
Hahaha... You are the typical ignorant "activist" aren't you? Why don't you go pass out some PETA leaflets?
Do you have any idea how much radioactive material is released from coal burners? The number I have seen quoted is that an older coal plant releases over 500x more radioactivty than 3-mile island...
"Chemical waste is alot easy [sic] to dispose of."
That that to the EPA and NYS DEC... GE dumped several million tons of PCB waste in the Hudson River a few years back, leaving all marine life in the river contaminated and unsafe to eat. It is estimated that if it ever gets cleaned up, it will cost between $800 million and $5 billion to complete, and whether or not the river can be cleaned is open to debate.
Also, all power plants by their nature take time to cool down... Steam turbines require steam, which is hot and pressurized and requires time to cool safely. About 20 sailors were killed aboard a US warship during the Gulf War when an oil-fired steam turbine exploded while they tried to shut it down.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Take a Valium and chill.
A bunch of maniacs like yourself went on the warpath when spent fuel & rods from a decommisioned reactor passed through a town.
People kept their kids home from school (school is 5000 feet from tracks) others picketed, still others tried to barricade the tracks.
A local "news" station conducted a test where it smashed a locomotive into a brick wall at 80mph...
Guess what happened?
A freight train with specialized boxcars with 4 foot thick lead walls passed through the town. It arrived at it's destination 2 days later.
There are alot of things that pose a real risk to you and your precious children.
-The corner gas station spewing gasoline into the water table.
-Insecticide sprayed by your town to combat mosquitoes. (Your kids play on the lawn the next day without even knowing)
-Highly toxic solvents dumped into your watertable by commerical & industrial enterprises.
-Deadly chemical & biological agents transported by rail on a daily basis.
You don't give a shit about this stuff though. You'd rather harp on about the remote risks associated with transporting nuclear waste, because the image of nuclear destruction in burned into your mind.
-- I hope you enjoy breathing the soot and smoke from "safe" energy generation methods, btw.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Actaull, Chernobyl and Windscale point out the folly of using graphite moderates (the burn) and no containment (stuff gets into the environment without much trouble.) Windscale, btw, was not a power reactor but was part of Britian's nuclear weapons development program. Thre Mile Island (TMI), surprising, points out how well safety systems and containments protect the public. Despite multiple operator errors, the reactor vessel contained the fuel material and the concrete containment was not breached despite hydrogen explosions in the containment.
/. posts) is cheap. Unless, of course, you are a bird that flies into the blades or someone who values the view over the mountains.
As for cost competitiveness, a well run nuke plant is competitive with fossil, even when you include decommissioning costs. In fact, it can be cheaper than building a new combined cycle gas fired plant (the current plant of choice for new production - and that doesn't emissions credits that the nuke can sell since it doesn't emit things like NOX). With plants getting their licenses extended for 20 years, the total production costs will be even more competitive.
Finally, any form of energy production has its negative side effects, but unfortunately our society depends on cheap energy to function. Hydro is great, unless you are a fish or they create a lake where your house stands. Not to mention the hegative impact of a dam breaking on the downstream populace. Solar - very nice, but what about the toxic byproducts used in production? Or the impact of covering large tracts of land to generate enough electricity to repalce even a small fossil plant? Wind energy is neat - after all, wind (like
Do we need to keep looking for ways to generate power that have less environmental impact? Sure. We could also do a lot more to reduce our use. But the reality is that we have no good alternatives to nuclear and fossil plants, and we will have to begin repalcing the older (mostly fossil) plants that are reaching and of their usefullife. To blindly rule out a proven energy technology based on fear, misunderstanding and clever PR is about as smart as letting MS guide your decison on using Linux.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
As a layman++, I don't see why there would be such a problem with this. The amount of fissionable material needed would be minimal.
Since there are no chemical propellants involved the risk of a Challenger-type accident would be eliminated.
As of right now, the link seems to be slashdotted, but I assume that water vapor would be a source of propulsion. Safe, clean, easy. We just need some R&D to make a rocket engine that can safely harness that power.
-You can cry, but you'll still die. There'll be no tears in the end.
Based on the limited and informal associations I have with nuclear engineers, most US citizens became afraid of Nuclear power right around the time of the Three Mile Island accident. The feeling I generally get is that the majority of Slashdot doesn't remember three mile island.
Back in the 70's and 80's, Nuclear power was considered the clean solution to all of our energy problems. And they were considered increadibly safe. Until one melted down. Most Americans seem to remember Murphy's Law ("Everything that can go wrong, will go wrong"), and as such, prefer to err on the side of safety. Furthermore, there _is_ a problem with disposing of Nuclear waste. That stuff doesn't just disappear.
In response to a comment I saw earlier about how the first use for nuclear power being a weapon. That really doesn't apply. We detonated the first atomic weapons back in the 1940's. Our Nuclear Power industry was booming in the 60's and 70's. It died in the 80's. People didn't just wake up and realize that this same technology had intentionally killed thousands. No, they were more afraid that it might _unintentionally_ kill thousands more.
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