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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
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
Why not just buy one from the Russians? They've been using them for 30 years.
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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?
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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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.
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.
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
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.
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... 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.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
A black hole as small as the Earth would not be stable. Contrary to what that Disney film will tell you, black holes DO emit energy, and a small one will rapidly shrink until it's too small to maintain itself.
In short: You can't have a small black hole that stays around. It will evaporate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation
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.
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
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).
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.
Ionized moon dust hangs in the "air" and sticks to everything. Solar is not a great option on the moon, at least until we can develop ways to repel moon dust. It would be too high maintenance.