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NASA Developing Nuclear Reactor For Moon and Mars
Al writes "NASA recently finished testing a miniature nuclear reactor that would provide power for an astronaut base on the Moon or Mars. The reactor combines a small fission system with a Stirling engine to make a 'safe, reliable, and efficient' way to produce electricity. The system being tested at NASA's Glenn Research Center can produce 2.3 kilowatts and could be ready for launch by 2020, NASA officials say. The reactor ought to provide much more power than solar panels but could prove controversial with the public concerned about launching a nuclear power source and placing it on the Moon or another planet."
Then they can give the reactor to me and I can finally send the power company a photocopy of my ass; I don't even have to worry about disposal! I hear there are plenty of countries like Iran and North Korea looking for nuclear refuse.
Nuclear power is actually one of the safest, cleanest, and most reliable forms of power ever invented. So long as no meteroites hit it, we should be fine. Huh. Wonder what caused all those craters on the moon.....
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The uranium that goes into a reactor isn't all that radioactive - it's the spent fuel that comes out that's the problem. If a rocket carrying this thing explodes on take off it isn't going to be Chernobyl. In fact, it sounds a good deal safer than all those Pu-238 RTGs that have been sent up there.
It shouldn't be more controversial than the reactors that powered Voyager and other deep space probes. There have been protests over some of the more potentially dangerous reactors that might have caused contamination over a wide area if they blew up; but IIRC they launched anyway.
A reactor that small shouldn't require a huge ammount of fissile material. I bet it could blow up in the atmosphere and produce less radiation than we get from a day of coal fired power in the Eastern US. Coal is full of trace radioactive elements, and it adds up when you burn as much as we do.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
It's a Stirling Engine....not Sterling.
An engine made out of silver? Or just a generally excellent one? Ah, a Stirling engine.
More quality editing from Slashdot...
The specs would have this thing lasting 8 years.
And yeah, the sun does run out. Or at least it isn't useful when it goes through an extended night. Or if it is in a location that doesn't get direct sun (crater).
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
That's one standard kitchen outlet in North America. You could run a coffee maker and a microwave, but not a whole lot more...
How much does it weigh in total (including shielding etc)?
Ian Ameline
Yeah, until the fuel runs out. I'm pretty sure that with solar panels, the sun never runs out.
I'm 100% sure you are wrong.
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
All of our inhibitions about nuclear power is why we are doomed. Actually even wrote about this previously... the real danger to the west is not nuclear proliferation from atomic bombs, but from third world countries adopting nuclear mining, nuclear aircraft, nuclear ships, and nuclear spacecraft and pretty much leaving the west behind in a windmill driven green feel good stone ages.
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Why not re-open research into nuclear thermal rockets? They were able to get them up to 40% efficiency back in 1972, I'm would hope we can do better than that now. Use the reactor to heat a propellant to get you to the moon, then use the reactor on the moon to power the base. If it's time to head home, you only need to ship a relatively stable propellant up, rather than actual rocket fuel.
Yeah we can't have dangerous, dangerous radiation in space. Think of the children.
Solar panels are great until they get dirty or worse damaged by micro-meteorites. Plus you might not have light 24/7 when you are on a large body like mars so you gotta add lots of batteries for your Solar panel setup unless you're ok with only breathing during the day...
When I first saw this, I thought it was for powering VASIMR plasma engines.
Recently, AW&ST had an article suggesting that transit times between Mars and Earth 30 days could be possible using a continuously running VASIMR engine (it has an insanely high specific impulse). BUT, it would require a nuclear power source because the amount of solar panels (especially outside of earth's orbit) woudl be impractical.
myke
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1. Ignorance.
2. The Internet
There is a whole lot of people who can now be offended at things they would never have heard of before or hand reason to be offended of. Never under estimate the ability of humans to make ignorance even more prevalent. What many thought would free us from ignorance only seemed to exaggerate it more.
I guess there is another option, it never ceases to amaze me how many people can find offense in anything. I think they have a need to be noticed or to find a way to blame others for any condition they are in.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
This is the most intelligent comment on this thread so far, why it is posted as AC I cannot imagine. It reminds me of a brilliant comment on the assembly of nuclear fuel rods: that they are so nonradioactive that they can be assembled by hand. The operators wear gloves, not to protect them from the fuel, but to protect the fuel from their fingers.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Why isn't NASA looking into technology to exploit the temperature difference between lit and shaded areas on the moon to generate electricity? That should be an excellent source of power most of the time.
Wake me when I can buy me a Ford Nucleon. 5000 miles on a single fueling. Take that, Tesla Motors!
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
When your talking about space, spending a fortune on exotic, super lightweight materials will save you many times more than that cost in launches. Weight is the main factor in the number of things that can go up in a rocket. I think I remember hearing someone mention in the ballpark of $25,000 per pound. So while you look at Cheap as the total cost, they look at it a bit differently.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
...unless you're ok with only breathing during the day...
I don't know about you, but I SLEEP during the night. Sheesh, this isn't rocket surgery.
-- i am jack's amusing sig file
Ok, great, they put the heat in one side of the Sterling Cycle Engine, and it moves to the other side and we get motion, but what do they do with the heat? There's no air/water to bump against a cooling fin to get the activity of the molecules. Does the "icy vacuum of space" actually cool things very well?
Yeah, it does. An infinitely large radiator protected from the sun and from the surface would cool to around 2.7 degrees kelvin, pretty chilly. When you understand why it won't cool any further, then you'll know a lot more than you need for this engineering problem, although it is interesting. There are engineering limitations where adding another kilometer of radiator tubing to drop from 4K to 3K just isn't worth the cost of tubing, and/or the power required to pump the refrigerant thru the tubes. Radiation power increases as a pretty high power of temperature.
If it did, why wouldn't a sterling cycle engine with one side in the shade and one side in the sun work pretty darn well anyhow?
Look up the rotation period of the moon. Very roughly, Dark for 2 weeks, Light for 2 weeks. Unless you make a engine thats about 1/2 the circumference of the moon (or, just the diameter, if you were REALLY hard core). Which is not totally out of the question, although it would be a heck of an amazing civil engineering project.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Actually, Moon dust is a bigger problem on the than Mars dust exactly because there is no weather. Weathering wears down the rough edges of dust particles. Without it, the dust retains jagged edges. It is extremely abrasive, sticks to everything, and is electrically charged. Once it sticks to something, it is extremely difficult to get off. On Mars, however, you can just wipe the dust away. It's weathered and smooth, like the dust we are all familiar with on Earth.
http://www.wired.com/science/space/news/2005/04/67110
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080924191552.htm
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090421-st-moon-dust-sunangle.html
Thorium reactors don't make plutonium. No need for a light water or breeder reactor for it. I'm told that the fission byproducts are an order of magnitude safer as well, but I haven't seen the math for it yet.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
metric ass-load = about .85 of a fuck-ton.
"which is ot that hard"
Okay, how?
Batteries are heavy and you have to lift them from Earth. Regolith has a pretty low specific heat capacity. Water works pretty well to store heat, or to make hydrogen, but on the moon you're probably not going to have much and you might want to drink it instead. You can compress gas to store energy, but where are you going to find that on the moon?
Well, in the poster's defense, if the sun literally "runs out" we have a slightly larger issue than our solar panels not working.
On an outpost that is hopefully* going to be permanently manned, 8 years seems a little short sighted. And if we're honest with ourselves, even those 8 years are not a realistic estimate. Consider that this thing has lots of movable parts and a very volatile coolant system all of which needs to withstand the extraordinary stress of launch and landing.
Consider RTGs on the other hand. They have no moving parts, a much longer lifespan, and a very well known failure mode (continuous degradation of the fission core and thermoelectric elements). While they do degrade considerably over several decades, they do not ever need maintenance and they don't fail suddenly like this very expensive and complex reactor will. Of course 40kW is an energy budget that could only be satisfied by several of these modules, but on the plus side this would promote a decentralized power architecture for the presumed offworld base. The reactor behemoth on the other hand will just fail spectacularly one day (probably after a long series of notorious problems that started on launch day) and Earth will need to ship a fucking big replacement package all the way up there while the Mars ground crew sits in the dark and with minimal life support, taking very shallow breaths.
* the reason I use that word here is because we probably will have just one phenomenally expensive mission that lasts a few weeks at the outset and after that we won't ever go there again. If the Moon mission era is any indication.
Could get difficult, politicians are extremely dense.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Capital letters were an invention of Satan after he was thrown off the Anunaki space ship. He gave the first capital letter he invented, the letter L, to the Australian Aborigines who used it to hunt animals and wage war with each other. It is no coincidence that Viking battle axes are in the shape of the letter T and the Nazi Swastika uses 4 L's. I realized this while watching Sesame Street and having a nice glass of distilled water and pure grain alcohol. All those capital letters are shown by - wait for it - Monsters! It's all so very clear to me now! We must now take our capital letter to the moon so we can make an end of them and the moon-dwelling Nazis for all time!
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Since there is specifically zero atmosphere, the only dust you're going to get on the rover is something directly applying it via ballistic trajectory. That's pretty easy to prevent with simply placement slightly away from drive paths. A wind driven environment will *always* have more dust flying around than the moon. there isn't any atmosphere to push it so it just sits until something imparts energy to it.
That's an impressive and very persuasive bit of reasoning with only the minor flaw that it's entirely wrong from beginning to end. The fact is lunar dust is very pervasive, fine, and troublesome. Here's an article about it.
You might kick some up, but unless the stuff is given a decent ballistic velocity it won't go anywhere. Can't exactly hang around in the air, right?
Actually, you couldn't be more wrong.
The dust particles get a charge off the solar wind and sunlight itself, then repel one another. Result: Dust hanging about in the air (well, mainly lack of air actually).
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