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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."
Here come the fucking jokes.
And with all of the demand for a nuclear power plant on Mars, it's a miracle this wasn't created earlier!
...That way, at least SOMEONE will set foot on Mars in my lifetime. I mean, jeez, Arthur C. Clarke thought we'd be to Saturn by now, and we probably would be if we'd kept up what we were doing in the 60's.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
This is ridiculous, Russia can't afford the upkeep on the International Space Station, let alone Mars adventures, even with the international support the article mentions, this is just hot air. It may be prestigious to be the first nation with a base on Mars, but it just isn't going to happen for Russia in the next 30 years.
On the bright side, after Red Planet and Mission to Mars, they can 'Pull A Chernobyl' and it'll still be only the third worst Mars disaster ever.
Please help metamoderate.
But boy are those scientists going to be pissed when someone points out where Mars actually is.
I also love:
Scientists say that the station is now almost ready to be built - all they have to do is to find a way to protect staff and environment from radiation
What about the small problem of finding 6 people to go to Mars, to work in a nuclear power station for no people for 30 years?. I think they have been watching 'The Simpson's' too much.
Building the transmission lines to bring the generated power to Earth is left as an exercise to the reader ?
They should think first on getting men on Mars. And then back to Earth. Alive. What to do there should be planned later, since of course there will be unpredicted issues about the environment. And there would be no point placing a power plant there if there were no people to use that power for something.
The power plant should be up and running by 2030.
Power station timelines rock. I'd love to propose this kind of schedule for my projects.
"New Version? Sure, we should start beta testing in (deep, echoing voice) the year 2030."
-n-
The main thing that will worry most people is where the fuel is comming from.
Uranium may well be available on Mars, but I can't imagine they will have the facilities to mine it.
If that means they have to take it from Earth then it could be messy if a launch goes wrong.
That said, I guess they won't need much fuel, its not like there are going to be any big cities any time soon...
Spell checker (c) creative spelling inc. (aka my dyslexic brain)
The BBC is reporting this? Wow, from the title, i would have thought that it would come from one of these fine sources.
20 mil and I will! Learn Esperanto with 20M others.
The enviromentalist always have a field day protesting whenever a sattelite goes up with a nuclear battery, unless the russians plan on mining uranium in space (unlikely)
Just imagine if something went wrong like chernobyl. Except this time it's 30 miles in the air where it can travel around the globe quite nicely.
Don't get me wrong, i'm all for space exploration, but the first hurdle Russia will have to overcome is a social one, not technilogical.
Seriously, though, Russia can't even keep up payments on the ISS. No one in the world right now has any plans on how to ship a live human being to Mars (and have him remain live there). "Technical drawings" alone won't cut it; I have some technical drawings in my closet that show how to build an SSTO spacecraft out of crayons (I was in kindergarten at the time of this techincal breakthrough), but I am not holding my breath waiting for NASA to knock on my door.
>|<*:=
I find it intriguing and interesting, even a bit exciting that they not only want to go to Mars, but that they want to build a base and a nuclear plant up there to power it. But the article (I know, I'm one of those weird people that actually reads the articles every now and then) was severely lacking in info. WHY do they want to go? For the mere "race" aspect? For research? In the article itself it states "the Red Planet is extremely inhospitable" and then also says how they want a permanent station there. That is a LOT of time, money, and resources for something trivial...yet they don't even mention what their main reason for all this is. Hmmm...anyone have any insights? Everyone excited and ready to see what this will be about in our lifetime?
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
There is a Russian version of the article, in which there is this paragraph (in my translation):
The scientists admit that they have no idea how this [taking large pre-built components and delivering them 300 mln km away] can be achieved. However, they are certain that once the station starts operating, all future inhabitants of Mars will have plenty of electrical power for many years to come.
Now THIS is what I call vaporware. :)
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
I can see the headlines now:
All of Russia was plunged into total darkness tonight, when their Mars plant transmission lines were accidently severed by an orbiting Soyuz rocket piloted by a joyriding Lance Bass.
The world won't end in darkness, it'll end in family fun, with Coca-cola clouds behind a Big Mac sun.
Forget North Korea, now the Martians will have the bomb!
They'll do it anyway. And we'll have a half-assed and dangerous nuclear power plant on mars.
While I'm all for a mission to mars, it should be a very well financed, international, and permenent settlement. The people sent there should not be coming back.
.
... 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.
The Russians? They've got plans for a nuclear power plant on Mars. 10/10 for style, boys. It's refreshing to see a little ambition for once.
Still, there are practical uses. With a reasonable supply of water, a nuclear power plant could be used to create oxygen and hydrogen, both for surviving on and performing experiments, and for fueling any return craft.
Martians concerned over Russian nuke plans (October 5th, 2006)
Rocky Canyon, MARS - Local residents plan to block Russian efforts to build nuclear power plants on Mars. Fearing potential health risks from nuclear accidents and what they claim to be a spotty safety record from Russians, representatives of a coalition of Martian leaders plan to raise awareness of the issues and protect or attempt to block the Russian plans. "Not in my back yard!" claims local long-time resident Marvin the Martian, "We do not want an Earth-shattering kaboom on our planet. We have no demodulator for nuclear waste."
Local retiree, Flash Gordon, points out that other environmentally sound energy alternatives are available like geothermal and solar energy. "I don't understand why we should be the dumping ground for Earth's waste. I'm also concerned about their need to use what little water we have to cool their power plants. It sounds like a bad idea to me."
Russia's Nuclear Energy Ministry plans to send a delegation to the planet in 2010 to hold a series of public hearings and town meetings on the matter. "We hope that once the great people of Mars learn the facts about our advances in safety of nuclear energy, that they will welcome a new cheaper source of energy," informed Dr. Strangelove, interim leader of the earth-based planning and research committee. The spotty record of Terran nuclear safety is well known to Martians, including the well-known 20th century Chernobyl and Three Mile Island accidents and the San Onofre security incident last year.
Total Recall star and former California Govenor Arnold Schwarzenegger is rumored to be an investor in the contruction company contracted by the Russian agency to develop the terra-forming technology required to build the power plant. When asked about his links between his commercial investments and campaign contributions to Russian elected officials, he withheld comment.
Mars and Earth are seperated by millions of miles, both literally and apparently in viewpoints about the nuclear project. We look forward to seeing if they can come closer together on this issue.
The space station was done on a US budget, not a Soviet one. The Russians have always worked with simple equipment where as we take the approach of technology being the answer to all. To be honest, had we really wanted to make it possible for all us to be up there, we would have done simple, repeatable systems.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I have completed my plans to build a Martian crematorium for passed-away nuclear power plant technicians. This first permanent extraterrestrial crematorium will be dedicated to help remember the dedicated scientists, as well as pet cats, dogs and aligators, who could not survive the blistering radiation and isolation of living on Mars. It should be up and running by 2029, provided I find a way to deliver my ready-made building blocks to a construction site 300 million kilometers away from Earth.
my blog
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.
Arthur C. Clarke thought we'd be to Saturn by now, and we probably would be if we'd kept up what we were doing in the 60's.
If our governments kept everything up at the rate they were in the 60s, humanity would have been replaced by a series of radioactive craters by now.
All things change for a reason.
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.
Sorry, couldn't resist this one. :-)
Sure, we could go to Mars. But what will it get you? Mars is a dead planet. There may be enough resources to run a colony. Fine, you have a million or so people living in a dome, breathing recycled air, drinking recycled water, and eating hydroponically grown soyburgers. That's just a drop in the population bucket. And if that's the way you're going to live, why go all the way to Mars to do it? Why not just build your dome here on Earth?
Colonies on multiple worlds is insurance against world-destroying events. A very large asteroid impact could disrupt the crust or kick up enough dust to freeze the oceans over, killing most non-bacterial life on the planet. On the more mundane front, toss a few cobalt bombs around and you can gamma-sterilize all landmasses. It is extremely unlikely for a natural cataclysm to take out multiple colonized worlds at once. It is far more difficult for an artificial cataclysm to be propagated between worlds than to have it occur on one world. This makes colonizing (and ideally terraforming) multiple worlds desirable for the long-term survival of our species.
This doesn't mean we have to devote all possible resources to it; just that it's a good thing to do at some point, and a nice long-term goal to shoot for.
Face it, we are trapped in our own solar system. Pioneer 10 has been travelling for thirty years, and is less than 0.03% of the way to the closest star. It should arrive in a little over 9000 years from now. The only two technologies that can get us away, are hibernation, and multi-generation craft. Are we going to put a couple of hundred people onto one of these spaceships and wait around for 9-10 thousand years to see if they find a habitable planet? No, we're stuck here.
First of all, we'd have picked out destination worlds and verified their ability to support life long before sending colonization craft. The cost of building a big enough telescope is far lower than the cost of building an interstellar colony ship.
Secondly, several approaches to building interstellar craft that don't carry their own power sources with them have been proposed. These would allow interstellar craft to reach their destinations within a human lifetime, if we're in that much of a hurry.
Heck, you can in principle do it with a big enough and efficient enough fusion craft (smallest mass ratio you can do it in is about 100:1, but even 1000:1 could be built, albeit expensively).
Assuming less design optimization or smaller craft gives a longer travel time, but I don't see why this is intrinsically unacceptable. Fully colonizing a world will take a comparable amount of time (generations). Terraforming a world (as is desirable if the world is to support human life indefinitely) will take at least that long.
Interstellar colonization is desirable from a species point of view for two reasons. Firstly, there are some classes of catastrophe that can sterilize entire star systems (nearby supernovae are the most popular so far). Spreading between stars, even slowly, would put colonies out of range of such catastrophes in a time much shorter than their expected interval of occurrence, and so is a suitable long-term safeguard. More importantly, launching an interstellar war is possible, and arguably reasonably practical. Launching a slower-than-light interstellar war without some magical new physics making things a lot cheaper is far less practical. Interstellar colonization would give us very good protection against most conceivable species-destroying catastrophes, either natural or artificial.
Thus, as a long-term goal, I believe colonization both in-system and out-of-system is desirable.
It seems extremely conservative to me that Russia would take 30 years to get to Mars, especially considering their stated plan is to build a reactor - they'll get to Mars faster if the reactor is in fact what gets them to Mars in the first place.
The U.S. has had a working nuclear rocket engine for forty years, according to a PDF on the ROVER/Nerva project off this page. These are relatively simple engines which shoot hydrogen out the back.
Of course the reference to "already built" is bizarre, who cares if it is already built if they are going to take 30 years to do it? No reason to mention that unless maybe they are talking about tested submarine reactors.
Of course the U.S. has a deal according to this March 2003 article to get Russian nuclear rocket fuels for the nuclear rocket program of Project Prometheus through 2009.
This pdf says that using the NERVA rockets of the 1970s we could get to the moon in a day, or to Mars in 4 months. The article by a Los Alamos researcher is interesting as it talks about the social problems versus technical problems. In all it seems that the nuclear rocket costs half as much, is twice as powerful, and is safe (at least from this paper it seems that reactor core products stay in the reactor). Also from about page 21 there is an interesting section on radiation and human exploration.
It talks about using a gas core nuclear rocket (GCNR) in which we are talking about how to shield crew from radiation in flight, not on the ground, but that this will mean we can get to and from Mars in much less than NASA's planned (1998) mission of 3 years. With a specific impulse of over 3000 seconds, a GCNR ship can have a 3 month transit to Mars, 2 months on the planet, and 4 months back - thus reducing psychological stress factors by keeping the mission to 6-7 months' duration.
There is also the physical deterioration from a long flight.. Apparently the current U.S.-Russia program is aiming for even better, perhaps 2 months each way using small reactors for an unlimited fuel supply and three times better propulsion.
More info:
link
link
link
pro-nuclear space space group with more information