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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.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
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'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
well, if the moon (and all of its nuclear waste) falls onto the earth, I'm pretty sure the radioactive bits won't be the first thing on people's minds.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
In the thin/nonexistent atmosphere of the moon, the rubber bands dry out and crumble quickly.
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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.
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