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Russia Plans Martian Nuclear Station
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC reports that Russian scientists have announced plans to build a nuclear power station on Mars.
They say that all the necessary technical drawings have now been completed, and all will be ready for the construction work to begin. The power plant should be up and running by 2030."
Is that the Russian space program is bankrupt. They had great difficulty even in maintaining their obligations to the ISS, and their shuttle program was scrapped and turned into a carnival ride. That is not to say that they don't have some great ideas and hardware. Maybe they can partner with India or China or the US and actually take their designs off the drawing board.
My rights don't need management.
That would be the "pellet" type reactors that most people think will replace the current rod type. You take hundreds of those spheres that, individually, are sub-critical...and put them together in a big pile. They go critical and produce heat. If you want hotter, you add more to the pile...if you want cooler, you take them away. I'm not certain how much safer they are in the case of a coolant loss (core exposure,) but the pile itself is more resistant to melting into a mass; if anything, individual pellets would melt through their containment and thus reduce the reaction. But still, those pellets are not light, and the accompanying machinery and generators will be very, very heavy. I think RTG's would be a better short-term solution...of course at the expense of irradiating their surroundings.
From article
From nasa:
Consider that radiation on Mars is very intense this should be a simple problem to solve. NOT!
I shouldn't say that. Human engineering has overcome much worse. I'm torn, though... a country that can produce very reliable Soyuz but at the same time consider shooting up one of the back street boys up there for the money.
Maybe they can do it. I am not holding my breath. This is a press release, not a reviewed plan.
I work at a Nuc Plant, so I'm all for it, but how much power do Mars missions need? I didn't see a power rating of this plant, it'd be nice to keep things in perspective. If I had to go nuclear on Mars, I'd build a power plant; thus, I'd like to get as much geological (arielogical?) data as possible for mining and processing. I bet it'd be a lot cheaper to mine materials on site than ship them over. Not to mention getting stuff built on earth over, with a 50% or so success rate historically getting anything there (worse than FedEx, I think). 'Course, we'd have to power the mining equipment... Damn you, immutable laws of causality! If I did have to ship one over, and power is not much of a concern in the onset, how about a windfarm? Pieces parts would ship nicely and wouldn't spread all that nasty fuel bits in the event of a failed launch.
"The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the pieces." --Aldo Leopold (Paraphrased)
... isn't even worthy of the title "junk science." It's been debunked thoroughly.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Maybe it's Chernobyl, but somehow I still don't trust Russian nuclear reactor designs.
If you're gonna put a nuclear reactor on Mars, ferchrissake, make it a CANDU. Not only was the CANDU designed in Canada (w00t!), but it's also really, really safe.
I don't know about what happened in Soviet Russia, but these days no one sticks a gun to an astronauts head and tells him he's flying or else. I don't mean to belittle the commitment of the people who fly to space, but they are not unaware of the risk they are taking.
The only way to make space flight safer for men in space is to send men in space. Even in our enlightened computing era, automated probes are good only for reporting back on things we anticipate ahead of time and build sensors for. They cannot report on the unexpected, nor can they cope with it. Also the speed of light is a factor, our best control systems are far from instantaneous over the distances in question.
I don't advocate sending live humans into totally unknown and unpredictable situations. And smaller unmanned probes are certainly a cheap way of doing just that. At some point however you need a real brain out there on the spot, and the day is coming.
I'm not certain how much safer they are in the case of a coolant loss (core exposure,) but the pile itself is more resistant to melting into a mass; if anything, individual pellets would melt through their containment and thus reduce the reaction. But still, those pellets are not light, and the accompanying machinery and generators will be very, very heavy. I think RTG's would be a better short-term solution...of course at the expense of irradiating their surroundings.
Actually, part of the point of a pebble-bed reactor is that it can't run away. Pellets expand as temperature increases, moving them outside of the envelope for criticality. The result is a core that automatically balances itself right at the critical threshold, resisting changes in either direction. The number of fuel spheres present (and the shape of the collection) determines the temperature at which the whole thing stabilizes (more material, and it needs to be farther apart - and so hotter - to stabilize). When designed with safety in mind (e.g. with the best possible core arrangement and little enough fuel to stay below problematic temperatures) there's no way for it to have a runaway reaction.
Tapping heat off drops the temperature, cooling the pile, and increasing the reaction rate until temperature stabilizes. Losing coolant causes it to heat and expand, dropping the reaction rate, and letting it stabilize. The only way you'd get an accident happening is by adding more fuel, or breaking up the fuel pebbles and carefully arranging fuel and graphite moderator for a higher reaction rate. Not going to happen by accident.
Re. RTGs, a radiothermal source generally doesn't cause activation of its surroundings. It's neutron radiation that does that; RTGs generally just emit alpha or beta radiation (depending on material used, of course). They're easy to shield, too (against primary radiation; you'll still get gama shining through, and x-rays as secondary radiation produced in the shielding).
A fission reactor, by contrast, produces neutron radiation and makes everything near the unshielded core radioactive.
Because it'll cost more to sustain life on the Moon than Mars due to transporting water
Moderators Moderators do your worst.
After all, I'm an Anonymous Coward
There is no such thing as a bachelor degree in Russia. You either take 5-7 years in university and get "highest education"/University diploma (what is not even called a degree in Russia), or you get nothing at all. Only postgraduate students can get Candidate and Doctor degrees, after one and two dissertations correspondingly. So please, don't diss things that you have no freaking idea about, most of American "Ph.D" would have their education level listed as "Secondary school" or "Incomplete highest" in Russia.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
My high school physics teacher told us that the winds and temperature are not such huge factors because the atmosphere is really thin... Of course he was kind of a lunatic, so he/I could be wrong. :-D
"Ask me about Loom"
Wasn't till just before Stalin (when Lenin was alive, but out of service on account of a stroke or two) that it became oppressive.
They were oppressive from day one, maybe two. Lenin and Trotsky ordered to suppress and decimate any opposition they faced. Stalin got to suppress pretty much the opposition he imagined.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
Not likely.
Russian compact reactor technology is based on fast neutron breeders with Bismuth based alloys as a first level cooling agent. As a result they can be considerably smaller in size and weight then the conventional U235/water or U235/graphite jobs and can run at higher core temperatures.
I have seen pictures of a portable generator (not very big one (it was not written anywhere how many kW could it give) that fits on a standard size Ural truck.Even if they were fake (Soviet Russia jokes), it would not have been far off in terms of size.
Anyway, I still do not see us (Earthlings) shipping this shit to Mars unless we also start using nuclear drives in space and this is more then 30 years off unless someone suddenly redirects a considerabl chunk of the military budgets around the world to space exploration. Any comet threats anyone? Please?
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
For all those who don't understand the above, Kim Stanley Robinson wrote a book called Red Mars , which is about the colonization of Mars. Even world famous author Arthur C. Clarke says: "The best book on the colonization of mars that has ever been written..." (The quote is on the cover). There are two books that follow up on Red Mars, namely, Blue Mars , and Green Mars.
They already have a working prototype!