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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."
...GreenPeace launch their intergalactic spaceship to intercept NASA in orbit and all of the zero-g protesters.
Unless the NIMBY crowd change to NIMOrbit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space:_1999
Asking for trouble... 'cos this didn't work out too well for Moonbase Alpha.
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Now to implement The Alan Parsons Project!
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
Don't you need water to make electricity with a nuclear reactor, and also to cool the core?
Nuclear technician, spaceflight experience. Not as proficient as the inanimate carbon rod, but who is?
I often asked why we can't dump our waste into space ala Superman IV.
The response is usually "Oh won't somebody think of the children if one rocket ever dropped!".
But apparently we can send it to the moon safely?
Could somebody, who perhaps knows more about the difference between uranium before and after it has been used, enlighten me as to why this would be safer?
I'm hoping someone can explain to me why the far better-established and easily-maintained option of Solar Power isn't first on the list.
I mean: negligible atmosphere, established support-structure (the ground), 100% predictable yield, negligible material costs after setup, and land-area isn't such a big issue... can't really think of a better case for it.
Meta will eat itself
Does anyone have any idea how often the lunar outpost would need to be resupplied with fissile material? I guess the risk analysts will be plugging that frequency, and that with which rocket launches fail/explode into a risk equation along with the cost of cleaning up a load of uranium(?) dust in Florida.
Maybe this is just a tad obvious to me, but surely being on the moon and without having that pesky earth atmosphere getting in the way, Solar power would be a better choice?
I know they're not very efficient and all, but satellites have been using solar power for years and it's not like the Moon is lacking the space for it. Hell, you don't even have to deal with things like leaves, rain and such getting in the way - there's no bloody wind on the moon.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
you have to be a lunatic to put fission on the moon. it seems once a month i encounter some sort of hairbraned scheme like this. i wish there were a silver bullet solution to these sort of moonbat ideas
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
What could possibly go wrong at launch time?
Queue song in iTunes playlist: The Weather Girls "It's raining highly radioactive nuclear material... Hallelujah!..."
Why not just buy one from the Russians? They've been using them for 30 years.
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...and no way to harvest it? I have to say they may not be thinking out of the box enough... and by box, I mean the earth and atmosphere. The moon has unfiltered access to the sun's energy. They should consider ways tap that. "Solar cells" are just one way and while there have been improvements, there's a long way to go. But there are all sorts of other radiation... and is there a fluxing magnetic field around the moon like there is on earth? If so, perhaps Tesla's suppressed technology might render some assistance in that regard.
They relay useing NAQUADAH REACTORs and just saying nuclear as a cover up also Homer Simpson will be on the mission.
...in a unit "about the size of an office trash can". Assuming Uranium-235 and spherical configuration has a diameter of 17cm. That would be for uncontrolled fission. Now add neutron reflectors and damping mechanisms... That's one big office trash can.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
A 40kw reactor like they discuss in the article would use a small amount of uranium, probably less volume of radioactive material than used for the RTGs in the cassini probe. Whereas we have tons and tons of nuclear waste to dispose of, not just spent fuel rods, but reactor internals, coolant, and so on.
You'd need a great battery technology to survive a two week night. Split hydrogen for fuel cells?
When the Large Hadron Collider smashes those particles we won't have to worry about the moon - it'll be packed in nice and tightly with us in the beautiful black hole. :p
Life==Jeopardy. All the answers are right in front us - the hard part is coming up with the correct question.
Nuclear waste is not really waste. It simply needs to be used in a different reactor. Storing this waste and doing nothing with it is really a waste.
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Nuke the moon!
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Why would we want to destroy the barren radioactive wasteland surface of the moon by shipping more radioactive stuff to the surface and moving in humans who will transform the barren lifeless wastland into tunnels and cave that can support life. How dare we.
Of course if we setup huge enough moon colonies and emigrated everyone from the earth to the moon then the earth could go back to being a pristine environment, ripe for life that could someday evolve intelligence again.
You wanna save the environment of earth? Move everyone off the earth to solar colonies and moon colonies, problem SOLVED once and for all!
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
The problem with solar on the surface of the Moon, is that daytime is 2 weeks and nighttime is 2 weeks. What happens if your backup store fails and it is night?
A reactor the size of an office trashcan, sounds very much like a Canadian SLOWPOKE (which is 16 kW thermal). Which is a subcritical assembly. It requires a reflector and a moderator to become critical, and is inherently safe. The amount of uranium in the core is less than what is required to make a bomb, quite a bit less. SLOWPOKEs can go decades between refueling. This NASA idea is a bit bigger at 40 kW thermal. The core is "just another piece of metal" until it is made critical the first time. Getting it into space isn't a problem. Once it has been started, you probably do not want to bring it back to Earth. However, to dump an old core into the Sun from the Moon is probably a much safer prospect than getting rid of nuclear waste from Earth by dumping it into the Sun (which people have proposed in the past). It is probably better just to leave it on the Moon if you need a new core in 30 years or whatever. I would expect that refueling is the same, just put in a new core. Much more like disposable batteries than the refueling of a power reactor on Earth.
Please allow me to inject a note of reality here.
There is a serious possibility that the Americans will not be establishing a lunar base in the next twenty years. Regardless of the technology or science available.
The problem is one of money. Basically the US government is broke. It runs huge deficits. This didn't make any difference in the past when there was no other place but America for super-wealthy people and governments to put their money. That has changed.
What has also changed is that oil has gotten incredibly expensive. Cheap oil allows the economy to grow. A growing economy allows huge expensive social programs like pensions and medical care to people over 60, moon projects, massive government bureaus, and permanent endless war on the other side of the world.
When the economy stops growing, house prices stop rising, and the sources of easy credit dry up, serious choices have to be made. Everything can't be afforded: some things must be abandoned. This is reality in 2008. It's not 1967 anymore.
The moon projects are easy targets. Although these projects are popular among the young and educated, these projects are expendable. There are no voters on the moon. There's no oil there. There's no one there who can be shaken down with atomic bombs to be persuaded to buy USA Treasury bonds to finance the endless deficits.
It's easy for the NASA administrators to hold press conferences and announce grandiose plans. It's easy to put big budget programs into future federal budget projections. But the coming years, when the true extent of the bankruptcy of the US government becomes apparent, these space programs might be quietly dropped. This is reality of the 21st century. Again, it's not 1967 anymore.
You mean Flesh Godron and the Large Hardon Collider is of less than immaculate scientific accuracy? That's unpossible. You must be a Democrat.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Didn't the Russians/Soviets already develop a reactor for use in microgravity environments? I could have sworn I read about it in the 80's.
"Technology.....the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it." Max Firsch
. . . . Yeah; this'll bring the Luddites out in droves. As usual.
Regards;
Maybe I'm missing something. I certainly haven't researched this, but fission is used to create heat which is used to create steam which then drives a turbine to create electricity, correct?
If that's the case, I would think that it would be pretty easy to create steam on the moon without nuclear power, as long as there's sunlight. Not to mention the easy access to reduced pressure which will lower the boiling point. I'd think you could be boiling water all day with very little effort.
From anyone who remembers Space 1999: they start using nuclear reactors/burying nuclear waste on the moon. Soon a chain reaction starts and BLAM! (actually no sound) and then the moon gets blown out of orbit. Or for those of you who've seen the remake of "The Time Machine", after a 20 Megaton weapon is detonated on the moon for construction, one later sees that the moon has literally been shattered (and giant pieces have come raining down on the earth). No way even an H-Bomb can, by itself, fragment to moon so something else must've happened.
I wonder if there is a (very miniscule) grain of truth to these possibilities. See the moon's been sitting around for 4.5 Billion years collecting Helium-3 from the solar wind which is a good fuel for fusion reactions. (That's why those fusion people want to collect it from the lunar dust). Well, is there any chance that, given a high enough neutron flux/ignition temperature, one could ignite this stuff? I mean, if there is enough of it there to just scoop up and bring to earth, what would happen if a nuclear explosion occurred? Sort of like the uncertainty surrounding the first nuclear chain reaction; they were concerned it could ignite the nitrogen in the atmosphere!
The physics of nuclear reactions is, unlike 60 years ago, probably very well understood and there is probably zero likelihood of this happening. Just like the LHC we can trust our physicists. Right?
It was a disaster after they broadcast it, too. Thunderbirds had better actors.
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Nuclear reactor for the moon: $2 billion
A year's supply of plutonium: $500 million
Spaceship to deliver reactor: $1.6 billion
Watching a nuclear meltdown on the moon from Earth: priceless
...now on a moon light night...it will really mean a MOON LIT night.
Joe Investor
Sure! We can put a reactor on the moon but we can't put a new reactor in the U.S.
google around for SL-1. Of course, that was in the early days of nuclear power, when they were just designing things willy-nilly without thinking things through completely.
It's not like it'll be hurting anybody/anything either.
Specially when you compare to all that already hits on a regular basis a celestial body that lacks a magnetic field or an atmosphere to dampen all the cosmic radiation (for example coming from the sun).
It's not as if the moon surface wasn't rad-hazard already.
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Skip making it complex and costly. This guy has the easy to build and maintain system. Simply uses gradiants rather than mechnical. As such, not likely to die when need most. Also, it would be useful if they put up several of these. They are going to need back-ups and the ability to grow.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Didn't see that one coming.
When I was a kid blowing up the moon was just a beautiful dream. Now it is science fact!
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Seriously - do people who are scared of that stuff even know how little energy that is? 12 kW is roughly 16 horsepower. Being afraid of a 12 kW fission generator is pretty much like being afraid of a firecracker "gosh jolly they're the same thing as that big MOAB fuel air bomb thingie they use to clear out caves in Afghanistan!"
my post was a failure. it was a very lame attempt at a joke
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
i have no problem with fission on the moon. my post was a very bad attempt at humor, and failed utterly
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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Probably not as big a deal when there's not a thick atmosphere to block incoming sunlight. On Earth, when the sun is on the horizon, the light has to pass through lots of atmosphere compared to when the sun is overhead.
Sure, you still want the panel directly facing the sun, but it's not exactly the same problem as high latitudes on Earth I would think, since the negligible moon atmosphere would mean more energy reaches the surface, even near the poles. I don't think it necessarily needs to be tall, it just needs to be facing the right direction.
Go read some more tech support calls & then rewrite that.
I wonder if the coldness associated with space/vacuum could be used in this case? You don't need water per-se, but anything that could conduct something to a heat-radiator would work well enough I'd imagine.
How about solar power though? Less environment = more rays. Night's a problem but a combination should work well?
Do we really want them to have access to nuclear power? On the other hand, the theme park does have a lot of lights.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I like to get one to power my house :)
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
My understanding is Helium-3 is non-radioactive.. I wonder why NASA (at the guide of the Bush administration) would be looking into such a energy source..
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Why does NASA have to do this for the moon. Why doesn't the moon just develop it's own nuclear reactor if it wants one? It's not like NASA has extra money and resources to be doing every other planet's work.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
In the thin/nonexistent atmosphere of the moon, the rubber bands dry out and crumble quickly.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
... to test a Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor. No oxygen to support combustion of the liquid sodium, and high efficiency so that you don't have to refuel it as often.
I'd love for us to use these here on Earth, but there's still too much flat-out wrong information floating around for them to be accepted.
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Ah, i haven't thought about that book in years, thank you! Oh ... wait ... as a earthbound groundhogger ... it's actually a pretty scary book. Drat you!
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
Waterfall Sr.: Our peace ring has 'em trapped like a tiger in a washing machine!
[The engine of the Planet Express ship flares up.]
Leela: Get ready!
Protestor #1: Look out!
Protestor #2: Hold on!
Waterfall Sr.: Here they come!
[The ship rises up from the middle of the peace ring and tows the tanker over the top of the protestors. It flies away.]
Leela: When you were planning this peace ring, didn't you realise spaceships can move in three dimensions?
Waterfall Sr.: No, I did not.
Ice Cream has no bones.
Now, for what I meant to say. The idea of reprocessing used fissile material to extract clean, fresh fuel is great - except that the technology currently available is exactly the same kind of technology which is used to refine "weapons-grade" material (the purity level of U235 is higher by a factor of 10, IIRC). Same problem applies to "breeder" reactors (which produce nuclear fuel from nuclear fuel, by turning the "waste" component of the fuel into Pu239, I think?). Here on Sol C, that's a big political no-no; and if you think launching a nuclear reactor is going to get the greenies' ire up, imagine trying to put a source of weapons-grade fissile material into orbit. Even if there's no export of weapons-grade materials and no manufacture of nuclear weapons in space, exactly how do you anticipate selling this to the small-but-vociferous groups which rabidly oppose any form of nuclear technology?
Then again, maybe we can put all the greenies on a rocket and shoot them to the moon? I'll bet that once on Luna, they'd all see that warmth and energy in a different, er, "light". Now, where did I put that Pu-239 space modulator?
They will test the ability of the reactor packaging to generate energy from a heat source. The heat source doesn't have to be nuclear at this stage of development.
Answer: Germans are afraid of anything nucular, just as Americans.
France reprocesses nuclear fuel and now they have the lowest electricity price in Europe.
I can't find the original PDF from the DOE, but I located one with the information I wanted that talks briefly about an effort to develop small-scale nuclear reactors for "developing regions" (i.e. the 3rd World and the Moon). This is from page 83 (96 of 332 in PDF) of the document.
A key goal of GNEP is to create an international framework that will allow developing countries and other countries without nuclear infrastructure to harness nuclear power while minimizing proliferation concerns. There are two parts to this framework: an international partnership whereby supplier nations would lease nuclear fuel to countries that agree not to pursue enrichment or reprocessing capabilities, and the deployment of nuclear reactors appropriately sized for the electricity grids and industrial needs of smaller, more rural, and less industrialized regions.
[...]
The U.S., the United Kingdom, France, Russia, China, and Japan comprise the initial set of global fuel supplier partners (DOE 2006a).
The goal of the GNEP small-scale reactor research program is to deploy nuclear reactors of 50-350 MW capacities with simple operations, fully passive safety systems, capabilities for remote monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and long-life fuel loads, possibly not requiring any refueling over the reactorâ(TM)s lifetime.
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If the waste was still usable wouldn't you think they'd have reused it "in a different reactor" instead of literally throwing millions of Euros into a hole?
Would a government choose to do what is logical and reasonable instead of what will placate the masses? Hmmm...?
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Eh, any idea how they'd cool the thing? It's fine to split atoms to make heat, but on the Moon you need to have a closed-loop cooling system. So you have to cool off the turbine exhaust so you can feed it back into the reactor. Problem-- no atmosphere and no lakes or rivers to carry away the heat. No groundwater either. Many many many meters of loose insulating moon-dust and rock fragments before you get down to bedrock, which in itself is not all that great at conducting away heat.
Methinks the Moon is not a great place to be running a reactor or power plant of the heat-cycle variety. Maybe solar cells.
great idea. instead of building a small factory on the moon to use solar power to make glass and eventually all the components of solar cells from materials on the moon, and to store energy if needed in caves full of rock melted with solar energy, let's consider an alternative method: launching nuclear material from the earth's surface to the moon, requiring all sorts of high-tech, risky, and expensive stuff which can be provided by our friendly gluttonous military contractors. I like it, especially the part about solar energy being unreliable on the moon.
The same thing that the SNAP-27 RTGs (radioisotope thermoelectric generators) did on the moon since the Apollo 12 (and other Apollo missions) landed on the moon.
They are still there and for many years preformed unmanned experiments on the moon surface after the astronauts left studying moonquakes, meteor impacts, temperature, magnetic field, atmosphere, and gravitational field in addition the long term feasibility of RTG study.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_Nuclear_Auxiliary_Power_Program
Isn't the moon polorized to have a positive and negative side due to always facing the same way and solar winds?
Isn't it therefore a huge capacitor waiting for something to harness it's natural powers?
Err.. you can make a bomb from any sort of materials (which is something i don't understand about the greenies who don't support breed reactors). Fertiziler for bomb components? Hell, ban water because splitting it into hydrogen gives you a fussionable product.
Can't heat radiate directly into space? I dunno if there are any materials that currently do this efficiently.
Could the heat be recycled somehow? Seems to me if you are dumping heat out of the system, you are dumping *energy* out of the system?
Take some of the excess heat and use it for environmental heating of human dwellings/workspaces, hot water for showers (could a shower be invented which works well on the moon? dunno), cooking, etc? (Granted, there's probably more 'waste heat' than you would need for heating, cooking, and making coffee, but you could at least use some of it for that).
Not really cheap when you include the massive subsidies.
Still cheaper than the alternatives (oil and natural gas).
BTW, "cheap" coal is not very cheap if you consider the impact of greenhouse emissions. And wind/solar require massive subsidies too.
Zapp Brannigan: It was almost the perfect crime. But you forgot one thing: Rock crushes scissors. But paper covers rock...and scissors cuts paper! Kif, we have a conundrum.
[Kif sighs.]
Zapp Brannigan: Search them for paper. And bring me a rock.
You can cool the core with anything. Various schemes used both on earth and in space in the past have used water, helium, liquid sodium, liquid lead, etc. Also helium is already commonly used inside Stirling cycle engines as the working fluid for the generator. Organic rankine cycles actually use a refrigerent as the working fluid. The Russian Alfa class submarines used lead to cool the core and heat water for its turbine. It had to be kept hot and circulating at all times or it would solidify in the pipes. Over half of the submarines were "totaled" when for one reason or another they had to shut down.
For those that are interested, the Russians developed a lightweight fission reactor back in the 60's to power their Radar Ocean Reconnaissance satellite (RORSats) that they used to spy on our aircraft carriers. This was the type of satellite that caused a fluff back in the 70's when Kosmos-954 failed to boost to its disposal orbit and re-entered over Canada.
The reactor only weighed 130 kg and it generated 100 kW of thermal energy, but because it used low efficiency thermocouples to turn heat directly into electricity, it only generated 3 kW electrical. It was sodium cooled. This NASA reactor will use a thermodynamic cycle to spin a generator, and probably have an efficiency between 10 and 20%, so the core doesn't need to be much larger than the Russian version. I'm guessing it will probably be liquid metal cooled with a heat exchanger to expand helium for the generator.
And just to be clear, you can use water in a space reactor if you want. You just have to design for corrosion and used a closed loop so the water re-circulates.
Didn't we agree not to put reactors bigger than some particular size in space early on in the space race? I remember this being the reason why the Daedalus project couldn't possibly be implemented.
So someone who remembers: Is it reactors or uncontrolled reactions (ie bombs)? Is it just in orbit, or anywhere in space? Would the moon count?
If the waste was still usable wouldn't you think they'd have reused it "in a different reactor"
Most of a "waste" fuel rod that comes out of a conventional fission reactor is perfectly usable fuel, which can be extracted via reprocessing, as is done in France. However, politically, reprocessing can be a touchy subject, since it can be related to nuclear proliferation.
Alternate reactor types (Integral Fast Reactor, for example) can actually burn what was once considered waste.
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now I have to run and hide from the spelling nazis.
It's apparently very cold in space...they can probably just open a door if it starts to get too hot in there.
Do you know the old Klingon proverb which tells us that revenge is a dish that is best served cold...?
Bow-ties are cool.
I was under the impression there are significant international treaties making fission and fusion devices in space a big no-no (wouldn't it be handy if NASA could make nuclear powered rocket engines?). I think the ban on atmospheric nuclear tests might have something to do with this, anyone know if there are similar treaties in effect in space? Admittedly, a small fission reactor seems like a plausible way of producing energy for scientific stuff in space, in areas where solar energy is not plausible (dark side of the moon) or to provide sufficient energy for high-energy experiments, such as those related to material science.