Slashdot Mirror
NASA Developing Small Nuclear Reactor For the Moon
marshotel writes "NASA astronauts will need power sources when they return to the moon and establish a lunar outpost. NASA engineers are exploring the possibility of nuclear fission to provide the necessary power, and they are taking initial steps toward a non-nuclear technology demonstration of this type of system."
The same thing that happens to everything else we brought to the moon that we didn't also use to get people/objects back. It's going to sit there. It's not like it'll be hurting anybody/anything either.
Getting anything into space, and all the way out of earth orbit, is monumentally EXPENSIVE.
Digging a big hole in the ground is monumentally CHEAP (at least in relative terms).
The people you've heard from, that are scared of sending radioactive material into space, are monumentally STUPID.
Also, fissile nuclear material is a highly valuable, relatively scarce, and non-renewable resource. It's more than likely that we'll need to dig that stuff up again in a century, and reprocess it. Quite a bit harder to do so if it's on it's way to Pluto.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
And if it ever became a problem, just use a big slingshot (or whatever) to hurl it off in the general direction of the sun .. the only reason we dont do this with nuclear waste now is that the cost-to-orbit sucks, but for a reactor on the moon or already in space, most of the cost is absorbed already.
Assume, for a moment, that the LHC destroys the Earth by turning it into a black hole. Know what would happen to the moon?
The Moon would be unaffected. It's just as happy to orbit a 5.9736*10^24 kg black hole as it is to orbit a 5.9736*10^24 kg planet.
Black holes are just gravity, people. The only difference between them and anything else with mass is that you can get closer before you hit the event horizon than you could get before you hit the surface.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Because it is a horrifically bad idea.
Nuclear waste is not waste, it is nuclear fuel that has been partially used, but still retains 90% or so of its functionality. Using feeder breeder reactors we could easily reprocess this "waste" while generating close to 10 times the energy of a standard nuclear reactor (for the same amount of fuel) while producing waste that is only potentially dangerous for a few hundred years, vs potentially thousands of years.
The only problem is that people are dumb. And the idea of building anything nuclear (pronounced Nook you ler) invokes the same kind of response as declaring that you worship satan in a southern baptist church.