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Homer Hickam Speaks Out For Fission Rockets
jonerik writes: "Former NASA engineer Homer Hickam (perhaps best known for his 1998 memoir "Rocket Boys," which was turned into the 1999 motion picture "October Sky") has this article in Technology Review in which he advocates that the U.S. revive its nuclear rocket program of the '50s and '60s, arguing that nuclear-powered rockets are the only realistic way of opening up the rest of the solar system - particularly Mars - to human exploration."
i'm not sure if by "Big Bang" you mean a fission explosion or the beginning of everything... either way, it's funny.
To propose that we spend more money on NASA (with cutbacks already planned), the "nuclear fission" rocket may just be a pipe dream. It's hard to convince people that we need to explore space when the topic of the day is terrorism.
Is slashdot deleting users?
He is 100% correct in his assessment that nuclear power is our only currently viable option to explore the rest of the solar system.
Unfortunately, people are so freaked out about anything with the word "nuclear" or "reaction" attached to it the only way they would ever put a dime in it is if it was called "The Wonder Drive" or "Warp Drive". The really sad part about that is nuclear powered rockets really wouldn't be that dangerous. The most dangerous part about them would be getting the fuel off planet, which is not as dangerous as it sounds.
Beer Die is the game of champions Learning To walk my own path.
What sets this apart from most arguments for space exploration (at least in the popular media) is that he argues based on a need (energy) rather than talking about exploration and science for its own sake.
** The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employers - past, present, or future**
I suppose it was meant to be ambiguous...
Nice to see an old-timer get a little coverage on /., but he really covers no new ground in that short article.
The major objections then, as now, are:
- What happens if fission powered rockets crash? Instant nuclear disaster, unless the containment vessel holds (and it might, but the public will not be convinced it would).
- Other countries fears that fission powererd rockets are actually orbiting nuclear weapons, able to be dropped on them at will. And again, even if they weren't bombs, orbiting fission rockets would be nuclear weapons: all you have to do is build the containment vessel so it can be blown apart on impact via conventional explosives, leaving a cloud of contamination.
I don't predict these space nukes are coming any time soon. Better to invest in laser propultion and linear magnetic launchers.
I mean it, I wanna go to Mars and I was born too early! Let's get with the program people.
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
How do you keep the reactor of the submarine or the aircraft carrier from irradating the crew?
I'm sure they have figured that out long ago.
The reactor shielding required for a manned spacecraft is pretty large. There isn't any particular mass savings through using a nuclear power source... most of the mass for a deep space mission is reaction mass, and the specific impulse developed by a nuclear rocket is only about 2 times that of a chemical rocket... reaction mass savings ends up being on the order of 75%, but this is offset by the increased payload/structural mass.
Now, if someone could finally get fusion rockets to work, I think we could finally go someplace. But I am skeptical about using fission for manned missions.
Incidently, "October Sky" is an anagram for "Rocket Boys".
--
The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
Whilst nuclear is one option to get us out there, particularly to the furthest planets, I don't agree that this is necessarily the way to go.
Putting the supposed issues of launching nuclear rockets to one side, all of the issues we know of will be solved by using the existing resources of space, rather than trying to launch every little thing from the earth. Right now we are doing the space equivalent of driving from East to West coast America, whilst carrying all our gas with us for the whole trip. Ever heard of gas stations?
NEOs and the moon have plenty of fuel for us to use, and if you refuel in space, the maximum distances we can go are enormous.
The other issues also become non issues. Radiation? A few tonnes of shielding isn't a problem if you have enough fuel. Gravity? Spin your spacecraft on a tether, and simulated gravity is plenty good enough [the only reason that this isn't proposed right now is mass constraints, also they want zero-g in the ISS for example]. Again, use non terrestial sources for materials, and most issues are gone.
Nuclear is an entirely safe and reasonable approach. But it's not a necessary one. And politically there are huge issues; for what are mostly dumb reasons. But we have to deal with dumb reasons, held by misguided people in life.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Here is a link to that : here
Anyway, nuclear rockets are a great idea. A better one, you may have heard me harp on this before, is VASIMR. It is a plama rocket with a nuke power source. It will be around ten times as efficient as the nuke rockers. However, the VASIMR, unlike the nuclear rocket, it does not have enough thrust to launch from earth. It is more a slow and steady engine that runs for weeks instead of minutes. But the burnout velocity of a VASIMR can be vastly higher than a chemical rocket.
The nuclear rocket can provide cheap, efficient space launches with not too much radioactive fallout. In fact, if a nuclear rocket using helium as a propelent will produce no fallout at all. Since a nuclear rocket is about twice or three times as efficient as a chemical rocket, the amount of fuel you'd need would be slashed dramatically. A nuke rocket launch might only use 10% or less of the fuel that a conventional booster would.
It's under R&D.
It ionizes hydrogen with microwaves an then accelerates them with magnetic fields. While it doen't provide thrust like a chemical rocket, it certainly has many, many times more thrust than a ion engine. It has some oomph to it. For cheap launches, you really need somthing like the x-42 scramjet spaceplane. That would cut costs of launching by a factor of 10 with no giant lasers.
VASIMR will get a specific impulse of 30,000 seconds compared to 500 seconds for the shuttle's engines. A specific impulse is the number of seconds 1 kg. of fuel could produce 1 kg. of thrust. The specific impulse of the VASIMR is 60 times better than the shuttle. That is many times better than the ~1500 seconds you'd get with the nuclear rockets.
That would allow cheap interplanetary voyages anywhere in the solar system, using very little fuel. Using these engines, you could get to Saturn in less than a year. It would also allow slow intersteller trips of around 1% the speed of light.
Also, VASIMRs could be easily, cheaply, and quickly refueled for more missions.Interplanetary travel could become cheap. I bet each ship would cost around 5 billion dollars initialy. After that, it's cheap. After each trip, an X-42 could come and restock the ship with fuel and supplies. That would only cost around 50 million. We could send tens of thousands to colonize Mars.
BTW: On this article, it says the VASIMR gets 10,000 seconds. It can reach 30,000 with further development.
Read about the VASIMR here
--
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
Beneficent advances in nuclear fission are made all the time. Check this article out.
visit the hwky website for a lyrical genius infusion.
I think the idea of going to Mars is wrong headed. I don't think an exploration of Mars will lead to great new developments for humanity. I don't think the idea of colonizing Mars is practical, and if it was, it certainly won't help humans on the Earth. I realize Apollo R&D helped lead the push towards creation of ICs, but I think any R&D budget would be better spent elsewhere...
Specifically, I hear about the idea of terraforming, which even with the most advanced technologies would take a ridiculous amount of time, even if it's possible to replicate the complex necessities of Earth conditions on a planet wide scale. Or the idea of releaving overpopulation through colonization, which is so silly it can be freely ignored.
Mr. Hickam seems to assume everybody shares the dream of having people live in a big plastic bubble far away...and the enormous cost, as well as the very real threat of putting nuclear reactors in ships that tend to blow up in the atmosphere, are insignificant. It's an odd viewpoint that he doesn't bother to justify. Will it make people's lives better? Should it just be done because it can? Manifest Destiny in space is so sci-fi.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
This was one of Kennedy's four goals during his Special Message to Congress on Urgent National Needs (a.k.a. go to the moon speech). He said that it gives "promise of some day providing a means for even more exciting and ambitious exploration of space, perhaps beyond the moon, perhaps to the very end of the solar system itself".
The nuclear rocket is probably the best choice in large distance exploration that we have right now. Solar power becomes useless pretty much past the Earth and no other power source can pack the mass to power ratio that nuclear power can. If we want to go big, we have no choice but to use a nuclear rocket or take a long, long time. The weight issue in rockets is a big deal, so alternate propellants are out since they will take up to much weight for the same power.
For close distance exploration (i.e. the moon) I don't really see a nuclear rocket taking any part. While obviously it could achieve its goal, its a little overkill for the purpose (and considering the fact that if it were a direct exhuast type it would have a plume of activated radioactive materials, assuming it uses water as a propellant, it probably wouldn't be that popular).
I hope this happens, and I've been hoping for a long time. Its our only real chance to get off the earth permanently at the present time.
Suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time.--G. T.
You're missing a couple of critical points:
In short, there are huge advantages to a nuclear rocket over a chemical rocket. Check out NERVA and NIMF, the two best treatments of the subject.
-- Jeff Paulsen
As a uranium producing country, Australia has seen a number of 'mishaps' in relation to uranium mines. Admittedly, most of them have been relatively minor, but they demonstrate that no human activity is 100% failsafe, and the potential for massive disaster is huge when compared to other forms of energy production, fossil fuels included. Of course, this does not diminish the need to find alternatives to fossil fuel sources, they are dirty and finite (ie. unsustainable). Nuclear energy is not an appropriate response, though.
Also, beyond the production and disposal of nuclear material, what happens when something goes wrong with the rocket itself? Could you imagine a nuclear version of the Challenger disaster?
I'm as much of a technocratic utopian as any other /. reader, but even I realise that the use of technology, and its impact on society, is more important than any geek factor.
Thats only assuming that you use the nuclear rocket part to take off. This is unlikely. A more likely case is it will be lifted by manual methods, piece by piece, assembled in orbit and then operated a safe distance from the earth. Even if these parts explode in takeoff it will not have any real radioactivity risk assuming that it uses normal fuel (ie uranium, not plutonium) since the half-life of U-235 is almost a billion years and U-238 is billions of years (longer half-life means less radioactive and billions of years means very, very small radioactivity). In newly built nuclear power plants you can walk around near the reactor without any radiation risk due to this fact. Of course once you start up, it has radioactive daughters and transuranics that make it radioactive.
Suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time.--G. T.
If it weren't for Da Shuttle, we could have had Moon bases by now. The Saturn V could take crews and payloads to the Moon -- Shuttle can barely make low-Earth orbit. Saturn launches probably run a billion dollars each, but each Shuttle launch runs a cool half billion, depending on who is doing your accounting. Besides, the Saturns were already designed while with the Shuttle they had to sink in several billion to get it going. Budgeting, say 3 billion a year, doing 3 launches a year to the Moon, by now you could have had over 30 years tons and tons of stuff delivered to the lunar surface. Instead, this same money was pissed away on the Shuttle and the stupid space station.
Nuclear is practically a dirty word. Just stick your head out the door and say it, and in 5 minutes you'll have at least 5 hippies protesting outside. They won't know what or exactly why they're protesting, but it has the word "nuclear" attached to it, so it must be bad.
It's the same way with health nuts and the word "chemicals" though they don't protest it, they just condemn it. Just walk up to someone in a health club, and ask him, "Do you know how many chemicals you have floating around in your body?" and watch him get a disgusted look on his face like you accused him of having herpes. Or ask some clerk at a health food store, "How many chemicals does this have in it?" and laugh at his ignorant @ss when he tries to claim there aren't any.
BlackGriffen
Homer Hickman:
"During his long NASA career, Mr. Hickam worked in propulsion, spacecraft design, and crew training, and won many awards including the Astronaut Office's coveted Silver Snoopy award for his outstanding support of the astronaut corps, and a special commendation for overall excellence from the Director of the Marshall Space Flight Center. His specialties at NASA included training astronauts on science payloads, and extravehicular activities (EVA). He also trained astronaut crews for many Spacelab and Space Shuttle missions, including the Hubble Space Telescope deployment mission, the first two Hubble repair missions, Spacelab-J (the first Japanese astronauts), and the Solar Max repair mission. Prior to his retirement in 1998, Mr. Hickam was the Payload Training Manager for the International Space Station Program."
Mike Eckardt:
"Like many of you, I wanted to be an astronaut when I was young. It wasn't the glamor of a high profile, high risk job. It was the adventure. I lost that dream sometime during my teen years, when I realized that I wasn't enough of a Superman to join America's astronaut corps. But hope springs eternal. With the increasing availability of space flight in the 21st century, and the advent of a commercial tourist industry in space, I may yet manager to make my way into the high frontier."
Thanks for your input Mike. We'll get back to you.
-Rothfuss
So what's the difference between drifting and moving at a constant velocity? Spaceflight analysis really shouldn't be done by people who fail to distinguish between velocity and acceleration.
Oh, you mean like Chernobyl? Not to make light of 100 or so deaths, but there are worse things in the world. It's hard to get worse than Chernobyl: Big core with high burn-up (that's lots of fision products from running), Zero containment, chemical explosions and fire at ground level.
Or perhaps you were thinking of all of the thousands of above ground nuclear bomb tests that the people have performed?
- Other countries fears that fission powererd rockets are actually orbiting nuclear weapons, able to be dropped on them at will. And again, even if they weren't bombs, orbiting fission rockets would be nuclear weapons: all you have to do is build the containment vessel so it can be blown apart on impact via conventional explosives, leaving a cloud of contamination.
Holy Armagedon, Batman! Do you think that this is a more practical means of nuking your friends than the tens of thousands of purpose built warheads lying around?! What shall we do?
I suggest we quit fooling around with bullshit fears and get some good use out of Nuclear technology. Projects Kiwi and NERVA were technical sucesses killed by ludite nonsense. We can go to Mars, we can exploit the solar system and we should do so. The sooner the beter, population expands geometricaly. We can use nukes to solve our problems peacefully, or we will use them the other way as we run out of exploitable resourses here. Chose your children's future.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
There are solar winds and Gravity produced by large masses(ie the sun, jupiter), that need to be resisted/overcome during planet to planet travel.
Not all highways are flat my friend.
The best a chemical rocket can do is get up to speed (burning up all its propellant in the process) and then drift to its destination, like a car coasting down the highway with its engine off. What's needed are space drives that will provide a constant velocity.
As any high school physics student will tell you, burning up your fuel and then "coasting" the rest of the way means that you're at a constant velocity. Velocity is a vector, with two components: Speed and direction. In space, there's no (significant) drag or friction, and so your velocity is constant. If you were to keep burning fuel, you would keep accelerating (assuming an infinite amount of fuel) which anybody will tell you is not a good thing when you eventually want to stop.
I see no reason to listen to somebody talk about physics when he clearly has no respect for the language.
Nuclear does scare folks. The medical imaging of NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) got changed to MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) because people were freaking out about the 'nuclear' part. Even though it was passive reading of nuclear states, not actively nuking patients.
l ea r.html
There's a good writeup on:
http://www.urbanlegends.com/science/mri_not_nuc
The "nuclear rocket" folks could take a page from their book. Call this "water rockets" or such and downplay the nuke, upplay the 'tea kettle' method (or what have you).
A.
Look... the guy was going great guns until he got hired by NASA. Now he's a media celebrity mouthpiece for them. He probably should have followed Von Braun out the door even though Von Braun wasn't his hero. Von Braun can't be as bad as the scum that took over and made NASA what it is(n't) today.
Seastead this.
NASA is already sending out hydrogen ion stream rockets, using the magnetic ionizer you're describing. It is a complete success, and many times more efficient than traditional rockets.
As for a scramjet launcher... that is silly. You don't save a lot of money. The major expense in a launch is not the fuel, it's the craft. A reusable craft does not always result in a cheaper launch, because that requires a fancier craft. For example, Shuttle launches are more expensive than disposible rocket launches.
Saturn in a year claim is dubious. Ion propulsion gives slow, steady, efficient thrust, perfect for long cheap trips, but terrible at fast acceleration. Though a combo with chemical early stages, and ion later stages, might work well for a fast distance trip. The actual thrust in the Deep Space craft using ion propultion is about the weight of a sheet of paper... but that really adds up over a few months!
See also: ion faq at NASA
i have found that many of those "hippies" are very well informed about how nuclear reactors work.
I learn more about nukes from then than from the average government or industry nuclear supporter.
Don't we already have fission capable rockets and wasn't there an article about who we have them pointed at?
http://www.kubuntu.org/
The whole space program is still following its trend of keeping large modules as a whole.
The whole premise is: "if we have one large system that has few parts then less can go wrong". That is an obviously flawed system as many things still go wrong. In fact the systems that have been designed as modularized have only failed once (space shuttle O ring, 1986. Where as the moon lander never once malfunctioned). Most problems in space happen due to problems not with main systems but to smaller malfunctions like a clogged pipe (not inherent in the design or function of the overall system).
But I digress, outer space is not a good environment for large thurst engines, smaller long lasting engines are good. That compares to the large engines required to leave Earths initial gravity. Again, we try to adapt one engine to both systems.
As previously posted, high thurst reusable efficient engines for getting a space ship out of our atmosphere and into a different environment (you don't see me driving a car in the Marianas trench).
The reasons that modularized systems don't fail is because we think they're going to fail so we study them to death and make them really safe, thus no failure.
internet like monkeys'
No one has been doing research on nuclear rockets for 30 years. How long will we let our fear keep our technology from advancing? We can make "bunker busters" and reactors that fit in the bed of a truck. What if some of that effort and those new developments were applied to nuclear rockets? Would they be smaller? faster? safer? You bet.
How long will our fear make our decisions for us? How long will we hide in the closet with the blanket over our heads awaiting the impending World War III? How can we know if a safe manned mission can be designed if our fear prevents from doing any research at all?It is clear that nuclear power has an energy density far superior to any chemical rocket. It is clear that we will never do anything useful on the moon or mars if the only way to get there is the Saturn V.
-- Bob
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
Seems to be much safer and more efficient.
internet like monkeys'
Yes. Slow intersteller trips. The ship would probably be passed en route by faster ships. However, it is an easy way to send huge quatities of materials to other stars.
.1 C would be nicer for fast manned missions or probes. That would mean 40 years to Alpha Centauri. That is doable, but would require an enormous amount of fuel. .1 C, you can use several different methods.
.2 C by a 10 gigawatt beam of microwaves from an orbital power station. Very easy to do, especialy if we have nanotech. .9999 C. The gold-foil sail would be only a couple atoms thick, and supported by a scaffolding of nanotubes. The sail would weigh only a few thousand tons. The payload could be a million tons. That sounds fantastic, but an extremely advanced civilization with nanotech and AI could easily do it.
.01 C like you can reach with the VASIMR would be excellent for intersteller resupply, or sending huge numbers of people for colonization.
To reach
1. Fission fragment sail or reactor.
Uses thin films of highly fissionable Americium as fuel.
The fission fragments from the nuclear reaction escape at very high velocities, propelling the ship very fast. You can't use plutonium in this setup because it cannot fission when formed into thin films. You need thin films for fission fragment propulsion so the fragments can escape.
This setup can reach a specific impulse of 1,000,000,000. 2,000 times more efficient than chemical rockets. However, this gets too expensive when you scale it up beyond a small probe. Americium is fscking expensive, millions of dollars per ounce.
2. Fusion
Fusion's great. Once power fusion reactors come on line, the fuel will be cheap.
There are several different fusion concepts. The closest to being realized is the ant-matter catalyzed fusion type. It blows up little fusion pellets at it's rear. This uses fusionable pellets of Deuterium and Tritium that are surrounded by uranium. A very small quatity of antimatter is fired at it. This starts the fission which then starts the fusion and causes the whole thing to explode.
This could be built in 20 years. Everything is here except the antimatter. You only need a few micrograms of antimatter. We could be producing that pretty soon. It could theoretically reach 200,000 seconds.
There are other types of fusion rockets that could reach 1 million seconds. These use magnets to confine the fusion plasma. Some is leaked out the back for propulsion. However, it's hard to build a self-sustaining fusion reactor. Plus the magnet weight (1,000 tons) would have to be reduced dramatically to be practical at all. That's about 50 to 70 years away.
3. Antimatter-matter
Efficiencies of 10 million seconds
A helluva long ways away. We don't know how to begin producing enough anti-matter.
4. Beamed energy
In the distant future, the best thing for fast intersteller flight.
Just a couple decades down the road, we could build Robert Forward's starwisp probe. It would be 6 kilometers wide and be made of a fine mesh. It would weigh 42 grams, if you can believe that. It would be easily propelled to
For manned flights, you need gigantic solar arrays around the sun. Here, I'll talk about a project for a Class 2 civilization. That means one able to harness the power of an entire sun. Say, 100 years down the road, we decide to have thin-film photovoltaics constructed around the sun. That would capture around 1 octillion watts. Anyway, autonomous self-constructing robots and nanobots would get the materails off a large asteroid and begin constructing this. Being very thin solar cells, you'd only need maybe 1,000 square miles of materials. After a few years, we would have a working Dyson sphere.
Some of the power, maybe a quintilion watts could be funneled into lasers and broadcasted to a giant gold-foil sail the size of texas or the US or even much larger. The laser would be able to propel it to
Anyway,
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
It is really annoying when some one arguing from authority (i am a rocket scientist, listen to me) gives you misleading information.
Nuclear engines are much more dangerous than chemical ones.
If a chemical rocket develops problems on ascent ground control push a button and blow it up.
What if that rocket has a shitload of uranium or plutonium on board?
We have sent nuclear material up in rockets withsome nuclear powered stelites but they have a really negligable ammount of radiactive stuff in them, compared with what is needed for a mission to mars.
And if you think that rockets do not blow up on ascent any more you have not seen NASA's record recently.
So there you have it - thats a risk that he did not mention although it is a very relevant factor. Now you may say - the risk is not that great, or it is worth it, but it should have been mentioned in an honest article.
And also the thing he said about getting energy from space is such BS. If he knows as much about nuclear power as he pretends to he should know that we have enough uranium to give us energy for a loooong time and nuclear powerplants are much safer than nuclear rockets.
this guy sounds like fusking marketing exec giving out simplistic and misleading info the get more funding.
You still really don't want any sort of radiation or radiation leak in Antartica, even if the risk might be low. One thing history has taught us is that statistics might make us feel safe, but we rarely are. We also grow complacent, and then disaster befalls us.
However Antartica and the Artic would be an ideal place to build a rail-gun transport system, using magnetism to build up speed and takeoff velocity. Getting up to speed from nothing is by far the most fuel consuming part of the process.
Once you leave the launch ramp, you can use conventional Liquid Oxygen/Hydrogren fuels to get out of the atmosphere. LOx & LH are probably the BEST choices for use, simply because the byproduct is water, and not a pollutant like most of the other propellant mixes. And dropping water vapor over the polar cap is not going to do it any harm, more likely do it some good.
The cold is a useful ally for such a setup. Less energy required to put oxygen and hydrogen into a liquid form, an abundance of water for producing oxygen and hydrogen via electrolysis, and a huge amount of wind and solar energy that can be harvested for power (in the right locations). There is also the semi-conductor properties that some substances exhibit in cold conditions that could be exploited.
Once launched, an orbiting docking facility can then fuel up a craft for longer hauls. With decent designs, the propulsion unit would be separate (and have a standard docking system) allowing changeover in orbit for another unit more suited for the job at hand, such as a nuclear propulsion unit for intra-solar missions, or one of the many other propulsion systems that are in the works.
If someone comes up with a smaller or more efficient engine design, a standard docking system between the propulsion unit and the craft allows easy retrofitting and upgrading. Craft returning to the Earth can bring back propulsion units so they can be tested, retrofitted, refueled and relaunched on the next craft.
Anyway, enough rant, I've got across my point.
There are many places where you can put those windmills without cutting down trees. There are many places u can put solar panels. Sorry but there are so many more environmentally friendly powersources.
So please tell me where and how was I being dishonest. Notice how when i called the writer dishonest I did not resort to silly personal attacks, but clearly showed how he was misleading his readers.
And if you accuse someone of having spelling errors, then be really careful you don't have them either because then you just look like an ass.
Same reason we keep buying new computers even though we know it'll be outdated by the time we get it home. We have to do something or we'll forever be sitting at home saying, "Just one more doubling of processor speed and I'll upgrade". A bird in the hand is worth 2 next year, as it were.
Dyolf Knip
This guy is right. And it's sad.
A fission rocket could work. Working prototypes were built in the 1950s. But the safety problem seems hopeless. A crash would be a major radioactive mess, and eventually, a crash is likely.
You are worried about nukes going off on US soil? Guess what, It has already happened. Repeatedly. The difference is that the test site was in the central US as opposed to one of the coasts. But that doesn't mean thousands of Americans didn't die from it. These tests were done upwind of a town; they died of cancer...
(Area 51 is well known, but have you ever wondered where that name came from? It is a bomb grid reference. The place is radioactive.)
It is no secret, but since it hasn't gotten air time on the news alot of people don't seem to know about this. I have relatives who could see the mushroom clowds periodically from their homes.It's almost kind of like the rocket engine tests that produce huge clowds visable from Sandy, Utah. Alot of people have seen them, but few non-locals know about it.
"Never, never suspect the dreams within the dreams of dreaming children." ~The Amazon Quartet
just won't happen anytime soon
While NASA's funding is down, the funding to nuclear programs, specifically, is UP. This could mean (a) Bush's energy plan is looking everywhere for power or (b) somebody realized this was the next propultion system.
.sig last updated Jan. 14, 2000
I've read the World Health Organization's ten year report and I'd point to it if I could. Unfortunately, that one and a new one are not free information. Order it or go visit a library.
I'm not going to say there are no risks, what I'll ask you to do is weigh the risks of doing nothing. The shutdown of the US space program is a national embarassment. We beat up all the lions, tigers and bears. Even the baboons gave up (Appologies to W. Chruchill). The world is watching us and they expect results. We should show them that it is better co-operate and create new resources than it is to squabble over and destroy old ones. If we wait too long, we may no longer be able to afford the effort.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
I remember reading about a Bussard ramjet, a proposal for possible future interstellar travel.
The idea is that since interstellar space is not empty, the craft will not have to carry all its own fuel, but can rather use huge magnetic coils (around 10^6 Tesla in strength) to gather its own fuel. It would have to carry enough on-board fuel to reach a certain threshold speed, at which point it begins moving quickly enough to pass through enough space in a given time to gather all the fuel it needs.
It would work by 'funneling' hydrogen, which is the most available (though by no means is it plentiful) gas in interstellar space, into a fusion reactor. Needless to say, this is a long way off, if it will happen at all, but it's a really nifty idea.
Some quick searching reveals a quick once-over here and a more mathematical treatment here.
Everybody forgot we now have impulse drive! Even here on slashdot, articals have been posted pointing out that we are one step from warp drive, the part about getting something inside the warp bouble.
First, there's the well-documented high failure rate of launch vehicals -about 5% for the US, 10-20% for rest of the world. This figure doesn't include experiments or tests.
Second, the atmospheric reentry of one lost rocket schlepping clicking-hot material up the well can lead to the atomization and dispersal of that material in the atmosphere, transforming the earth into a mutants' menagerie.
The Space Shuttle has experienced a lower failure rate than the rest of US launchers, about one in one hundred.
There was an uproar a few years ago, about the Cassini probe. That probe, containing over 32 KG of plutonium, was lifted by a launcher which, at the time, had a one in twenty failure rate, and was due for another.
Additionally, there have already been three catastrophic failures of launchers with plutonium-containing payloads, resulting in world-wide atmospheric dispersal of a hundreds of curies worth of plutonium.
Personally, I don't have a problem with the idea nuclear power or fission-powered space travel. But there remain serious development before it becomes considerably safer. This isn't a marketing campaign, you can't convince knowledgeable people with images of spouting teapots, not when life on this planet is at risk. Nor will risk management white-wash keep people from realizing there's a definite, likely risk that people will die from an accident. [I work in risk management.]
So, what's more important, do we need to do this now, now, now? Or can it wait a decade or three, until we have nuke power better figured out? My vote is to wait a bit.
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
Yup, just whip a handy-handy Sears Roebuck discount Dyson Sphere out of your back pocket, follow the directions, and you'll have your own private Dyson sphere in minutes, just like on the movies... no worries, mate! (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...as if electric power were magicked out of the air. It turns out that they're right about the GM plants but for mostly the wrong reasons. GM agriculture is running into all kinds of problems including - tahdahh - lower yields. It's a research cul-de-sac so far.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Got it in one. )-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
No wonder nobody else replied - you mentioned a factor that was actually important. (-:
Solar power, wind power and stuff is nice, but the bottom line is there cannot possibly be enough of it even for our current needs even if we coated the entire countryside with collectors - so we need some new source of energy.
We ain't getting it here on Earth, so the obvious answer is...
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
On Barsoom, maybe, but not here.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Perhaps, but I'm hoping that habits will change pretty soon. If you look at the ever-growing effectiveness of renewables, there's real reason to hope for a genuinely clean solution. Even at present tech, Germany gets 50% of its energy from them, and they (particularly wind turbines) are getting cheaper and better all the time.
Long term, though, I'm still hoping for fusion. Between that and fuel cells, we could (theoretically) use massive amounts of energy while only endangering ourselves a fraction as much as we do today.
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." Salman Rushdie
look at http://www.solarbuzz.com/FastFactsGermany.htm
It's stats are:
German Energy and Electricity Industry German domestic energy sources in 1998 were:
Coal: 46%,
Nuclear power: 31%,
Natural Gas: 14%,
Renewable Energy: 6%
Oil: 3%.
In consumption terms, though, oil accounted for 44%
A common indian women was asked "how many children will you have ?"
she said:
"I've had 4 kids, 3 already died, I want to have about 10, and I expect 2 to survive"
this is a very rational probablistic view, not a stupid women at all.
the indians as a nation ARE stupid, since they allow the situation to reach this point, but the "common" people are usually not stupid when it concerns their own survival, or they wouldn't be so common.
and wether you like it or not, it IS your problem, since hungry people bite harder.
(note I don't say sending rice or whatever is a solution, I believe technological and political methods must be used jointly, with threat of force when needed, but in any case, it IS your problem)
Working for necessity's mother.
If you were to keep burning fuel, you would keep accelerating (assuming an infinite amount of fuel) which anybody will tell you is not a good thing when you eventually want to stop.
Don't see why I should respect you when you think Newton's laws are still absolute. Einstein, as you may recall, debunked your statement by saying even if you keep accelerating, you cannot pass the speed of light. Your acceleration therefore cannot be constant at a constant burn rate, but changes as you start going fast enough for time and space to show the effects of relativity.
Lawrence Lessig is my personal hero.
IIRC the greatest health threat that has happened in past nuclear detonations or accidents like Chernobyl are fission by-products like Iodine-131. I don't believe U bioaccumulates, so it's probably not as much of a concern except for very high direct exposure. I am not a chemist (or even a real engineer), but it seems to me that with fresh Uranium fuel accidentally released into the environment from something like an ceramic fuel pellet, either the pellet is intact in which case the by-products aren't being released into the environement, or the pellet is destroyed in which case they are being produced at a very slow rate (given by the long,long half life of the fuel isotopes).
Personally, I'd be more concerned with mine and mill tailings from Uranium production, which contain the full range of decay products in large quantites, than the release of freshly refined fuel.
On one hand, I think it is naive to think you can have a program which launches radioactive fuel into orbit on a regular basis without some release of radioactive materials into the environment. On the other hand, while I'm generally supportive of enviornmental positions, arguing a zero tolerance for release of radioactivity into the environment is to vague a position for me to support. What kind of radioactivity? What form will it take? At what point in production or use will it be released?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The problem with .999c is that friction (space isn't a perfect vacuum) would melt/vaporize all known materials, so how do you construct a ship/probe that can handle that speed? IIRC, at .3C all known materials melt due to friction...
The problem with launching nuclear waste into space is that the stuff is heavy. Remember, it's made out of stuff higher than lead on the periodic table.
Except that fission products arn't transuranic elements.They are more likely to be from the Rubidium to Xenon row on the periodic table. Indeed if you were to get symetrical fission of Plutonium you'd get Silver. (As an unplesently radioactive isotope.) Heavy Strontium and Iodine are also common fission products.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm under the impression that sending the fuel off planet is pretty dangerous. If a second Challenger were to happen, all those nuclear materials would be spread out in the atmosphere, which sounds pretty dad-gum dangerous.
Depends how well protected the fuel was. Even with the violence of the Challenger explosion identifiable pieces of wreckage were recovered. Aircraft carrying nuclear weapons have exploded before now.
Uranium is not very radioactive, neither is plutonium, and they are ALPHA RADIATORS, even a damn sheet of paper would be enought to shield you from it, only way to get a cancer would be to inhale the stuff and get it stuck in your lungs for a long time, and as you said, it's molecular weight is enormous, it won't stay airborne long enough for people to really breath too much of the stuff.
If you has a solid lump of metal the risk is low. However if you have dust, is much more dangerous because it can either be ingested directly or react to form compounds which can be ingested.
It may be a fine point but the range safety officer at a launch complex does not "blow up" the rocket. The range safety systems on rockets are thrust termination systems, designed to terminate powered flight. The goal is to shut down the engines, not to blow up the rocket into many small pieces. This usually involves shaped charges that open the casings of solid fuel rocket motors and the fuel and oxidizer tanks of liquid fuel rocket motors. The desired end result is that the rocket falls in a ballistic trajectory into a safe impact area and does not endanger people on the ground. The range safety officer has an "impact predictor" display that shows where the rocket would land if all of the engines failed at the same time. His job is to push the big red button if there is a risk that the rocket could stray from its predicted trajectory. It may look like they "blew up" the rocket, but that isn't what happened.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Actually (and very OT), you'd have a good chance of being right if you accused those health nuts of having Herpes too - 60-90% of the world's population has been infected with Herpes Simplex Virus 1, and it tends to kick around in a latent form. Furthermore, you could also tell them that 1% of their genome consists of viral inserts, and that therefore they are a GMO (sorta), but they might not thank you for it.
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." Salman Rushdie
How the hell is this flamebait? He gave numbers that are BS, I called him on it. Should we not correct people when they get things wrong?
Should lots of detail, with obvious mistakes, not be suspect?
I would suspect that if you can get going that fast, you can get enough energy from a Bussard Ramjet engine to power a device to ionize and deflect the material that your ramject can't handle.
A nuclear rocket as all the proper designs are laid out CANNOT have a meltdown. You CANNOT have a Chernobyl-style accident with a nuclear rocket. We are not talking Orion either - that is a nuclear bomb rocket. A nuclear rocket is merely a nuclear core hot enough to vaporize whatever fuel you choose to pump through it. It could be water, producing high-pressure steam. It is NOT automatic that a nuclear core MUST be able to meltdown (ala Chernobyl). Nuclear power doesn't automatically mean "meltdown potential".
If there is a problem with a nuclear rocket launch, you don't need to blow it up. Actually you don't want to. You simply shutdown the engine and parachute it down for recovery and repair and try again. There is no volatile, explosive fuel to worry about (that is the only reason chemical rockets are destroyed if they have problems. Don't want a big, explosive bomb landing on anyone. It is even too dangerous to shut them down and parachute them down. They can still blow up. Not so with a nuclear rocket. They are SAFER than chemical rockets.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
Mmmmm, fission.
Noo-cue-lar, it's pronounced noo-cue-lar.
I guess I do have the Right..., what's that Stuff?
Ooohhh, isn't there anything faster than a microwave?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
When you start getting out to Jupiter and beyond, the Sun is not a viable power source. For deep space you MUST have nuclear power. There is NO deep space probe that isn't nuclear powered. None. You want to get to the outer solar system efficiently and quickly, then you want/need nuclear. Also, solar isn't worth squat to astronauts on the Martian surface. Inefficient. You send a portable nuclear power plant (no, no it CANNOT meltdown damnit!) and have LOADS of power available to keep you alive and warm AND producing fuel for a return trip.
True space travel and exploration will require nuclear power if you are heading outward.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
According to a special I was watching on TLC, the reason that chernobyl melted down was that they were trying to generate power when it was unsafe. They knew that when they were doing it, but the Government pushed very hard on the engineers to generate as much power as possiable that saftey was not as large a concern as it should to have been.
You can't blame them... I mean, remember the gross misinformation promulgated in the fifties? "Of course the government has your well-being in its best interests!"
I'd feel justified in being a little skeptic of any claims The Man makes about nuclear power. (Or about anything else, come to think of it...)
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
At my commencement way back in the '80s, one the speakers was an eminent Korean researcher (name escapes me) who spoke a lot about NMR--which his accent rendered "Enema." Needless to say, I don't remember much else of what he said.
I love to expound to people on the horrors of dihydrous monoxide, explaining how many people are killed by it every year, how common it is, etc.. etc.
...then watch the look on their faces when I explain what it is.
Ignorance != bliss
Knowledge is like ignorance.. too much can be just as bad as not enough.
And it had a nuclear decay generator.
h tm
Perhaps cooler heads DO prevail.
Here's some links.
http://www.bessereweltlinks.de/english/book44h.
So what about a few tens of thousands of people getting leukemia over the next 20 years. I wanna go to Mars now!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Um, no. Breeder reactors do very little to address the nuclear waste issue. The big "advantage" of the breeder is that it transmutes U-238 (the most common isotope of Uranium) into Plutonium. This has the effect of reducing the cost of fission power, since you get a lot more useful fuel out of each ton of Uranium ore you mine. In general, breeder reactors produce more highly-radioactive waste than "conventional" fission reactors because of the higher neutron flux.
Fast breeder reactors also have a much lower safety factor than other reactor designs. They're more susceptible to small losses of cooling ability than other reactors. The safety record of breeder reactors in the US is not particularly encouraging, either.
-Mark
This isn't quite right. They were operating the reactor near the edge of its performance envelope, but at the low end of its power range. This particular type of reactor is unstable when operated at low power. Then some safety systems failed when the core temp started to get too high. As is usually the case in large disasters, more than one unlikely event happened at the same time.
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
I dont think he or anybody else is seriously suggesting using a nuclear reactor engine to get off the ground. That cannot be done safely. Readiation shields are too heavy, and the exhust will be more than "slitly radioactive", and a lot of it will be released very close to the ground. What he is suggesting is using the nuclear engine in space, so yes there will be plenty of rocket fuel while the rocket is leaving the earth. So an explosion is almost certain if the whole thing hits the ground. Even if the rocket manages to separate its rocket fuel before crashing, having so much radioactive material crash at high speed is just not safe. A nuclear rocket engine will not be low pressure. Its true current nuclear reactors are, but the rocket engine cannot be if it is to fullfill its promise of high efficiency. The whole idea of "a nuclear engine is more efficient than a conventional engine" rests on the fact that a nuclear engine should be able to shoot off water vapors at a much higher speed.
As long as people like that continue to refuse considering a cultural change as a meaningful option, then it is their problem. If millions die out of stuborness then I don't see how it can be anyone's fault but their own.
Even the prudish state of Massachusets has some nude beaches.
The permanent solution I'm talking about is worldwide education and prosperity. Once people are happy and well educated, most of them won't feel like running planes into buildings. Space exploration is a long term investment, just like education. But it seems that few people care about potential to solve problems forever, they just think what the media and politicians and the people next door have told them to think. If people in the middle ages had thought for themselves, they wouldn't have let the Church rule over them and torture heretics. Now I don't think we'll have a repeat performance.
Why can't we look for answers to our problems, instead of just throwing bombs at them?
I know you typed for a long time, but what exactly are you trying to say here. You seem to agree and disagree with this article, and you provide a myriad of incorrect facts to "back up" your "point". For example:
A chemical rocket manned mission was accomplished in 1969 - over 30 years ago. In fact, if I recall, they made several trips and nobody died.
Actually, three people died, and we almost lost three more.
8. Clean? Let's start with safety, which is, IMHO, a prerequisite for cleanliness. At...
Here you compare an absolute with a relative descriptor. Just because something isn't completely clean doesn't mean it isn't the cleanest thing available.
Also, you compare everything he says with what Zubrin thinks. Now I'm not saying that Zubrin is flat out wrong, but he hasn't sent any more people to mars then the rest of us. His ideas and opinions are no more then that, simply ideas and opinions. He is definatly one to admit that the problem is too complex to solve all at once. Even he doesn't know if he's right. You can't write off what anyone else says about getting to mars because it's not the same as what Zubrin said. There's likely more than one way to do it.
Then at the end you say: Yes, and in order to acquire more solar energy, we need advanced propulsion systems to set up collectors further out in the solar system.
So, are you for or against nuclear propultion? Do you agree with the author dispite all the 'flaws' you found in his article, or disagree?
Cheap - look at the example of British Nuclear Fuels, where there are less subsidies than the US situation. How many billions do you think they have lost? All those rare earths used in nuclear components are not cheap.
Clean - Learn some chemistry or physics. Advertising will not make it clean - only careful research which has not yet been done (it's a pity the advertising money didn't go into research instead, but the advertising obviously worked on those that are now young adults).
Coal, Oil or Lime flavoured jelly is more radioactive than released wastes - This is actually quite true is you consider the total amount of the coal, oil or jelly that is used each year, the only thing is that the radioactive materials are so spread out to be completely harmless (particularly in the jelly) and are of a different type to those in high grade nuclear waste. We are talking about amounts of radiation too small to measure on an unconcentrated sample (gravity seperation can concentrate it more). Remember, some background radiation comes from the rocks beneath our feet. Ten million tonnes of coal is always going to be more radioactive than a barium enema, but the coal is somewhat spread out and there are worse wastes produced from nuclear power plants than those that are used for comparison in their advertising material.
No carbon dioxide emissions - A good reason. Personally I don't think it is a good enough reason. Nuclear power is not likely to ever happen in the country I live in anyway. There are no plans for a nuclear weapons program, so there is no economic reason to have it.
Nuclear rockets are a different issue - we're not talking about just boiling water here. Some people protest loudly whenever they hear the word nuclear (like in the case of the cassini probe, where risks were minimal and possible consequnces small). Each design will have to be looked at on it's merits. People also protest loudly and not listen to reason because of all of the lies in the past - to the extent that some people will not beleive anyone with a technical background, because they lump us in with 1980's tobacco industry medical researchers.
Wasn't the verdict criminal negligence? Aren't the plants still built and inspected by the lowest bidder with "self-assessment" instead of real checks and balances? I would be very happy to hear otherwise. If not, the imbeciles still have seats in congress.Yes, there is a windfarm at home, but even the enthusiastic Cailfornian windfarms won't make anything like enough for half of California's power demands (which was the topic of discussion), and this is the usual case. Australia is fortunate in having enormous amounts of (mostly uninhabitable) land to plonk windmills down on.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
By golly, you were singularly fortunate to have a skillion roof optimally aligned for your latitude!
How does it manage to track the sun? How does it arrange to collect most of its power in winter and just after sunset, when it's nost needed? How often do you wash down your roof? What is your average annual cloud cover?
Does your energy budget include storage and conversion losses? What kind of cells did you model? Does it also account for the manufactured (`inherent' or `embodied') energy in your house, furniture, fencing, solar power system, car (and propulsion thereof), street etc?
Or ran the right MIPS boxes with no luxury items like video cards. You can just about power those from a hand-cranked flywheel.
You'd likely save more than that by replacing your existing refrigerator with an efficient DC-motor chest 'fridge.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...lofted at stupendous cost from Earth and still working after over 400 years in transit... `tap, tap, is this thing on...'? (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing