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NASA's Plutonium Supply Dwindling; ESA To Help
astroengine writes "NASA's stockpile of the plutonium isotope Pu-238 is at a critical level, causing concern that there won't be enough fuel for future deep space missions. Pellets of Pu-238 are used inside radioisotope thermoelectric generators (or RTGs) to generate electricity for space probes traveling beyond the orbit of Mars — solar energy is too weak for solar arrays at these distances. Blocked by a contract dispute with Russia to supply Pu-238 and the US Department of Energy that has not been granted funds to produce more of the isotope, NASA lacks enough of the radioisotope to fuel the future joint NASA-ESA mission to Europa. However, the head of the European Space Agency has announced that they have plans to commence a new nuclear energy program to alleviate the situation."
You know, since now NASA's #1 job is to make them feel good about themselves for stealing the alphabet from the Hindus who were using it 500 years before any god damned Muslim...
Pardon my ignorance and possible first post - but couldn't NASA just recycle some retiring nuke warheads for plutonium?
Goatse's asshole supply dwindling. Netcraft confirms it.
I have a chili recipe that produces a - er - "slurry" so radioactively hot, it could be used to power spacecraft...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
NASA is launching quite soon a spacecraft to Jupiter relying on solar panels. And the ESA spacecraft part of mentioned joint mission will also rely on solar panels. Seems they have improved quite a bit / I wouldn't be too surprised at seeing, eventually, some mission to Saturn relying on them.
Not saying that we don't need RTGs, we do of course (for further missions or more complex ones; using solar panels whenever possible saves RTGs for those...), but part of the premises of TFS is not terribly accurate.
One that hath name thou can not otter
NO! No I say! This just proves that America can't do everything, it just proves how weak we are and how strong they are that we are working with them. Strong people don't need to work with anybody else, only weak people do. Just need to get that out of the way before the other 200 posts saying the same thing.
They just need to construct additional pylons. Problem solved.
What is the airspeed of a fully laden swallow?
Seems like the US is passing on, or simply overlooking an opportunity to create a new small industry, making what is sure to be a product with increasing demand.
Everyday You see me is the worst day of my life -Office Space
Pu
Cultural Victory? Nope.
Diplomatic Victory? Nope.
Space Race Victory? Nope.
That leaves Domination Victory and Conquest Victory.
Decisions, decisions.
I hear they got the hookup, and they kinda owe us. Just sayin'.
The best way for ESA to help would be to take what NASA has left and put it to Actual Productive Use by a civilized, rational people instead of in the hands of a budding theocratic dictatorship.
The sooner America no longer has access to space, the safer the rest of the us will be.
Maybe they could use a Radioisotope Photoelectric Generator instead, at least for power, and save the Pu238 just for heating. From my understanding of it, limited since the only article (from 1981) I've ever read about it was the one I linked to, a RPG can use any gamma ray emitting isotope and will have full power for a period equal the half-life of the isotope used. And IIRC there are still several reactors in the US that can generate isotopes.
Never heard anything more about it, anyone else know more?
We've got 5 more years, someone at NASA better be working on Mister Fusion. And hovercars.
I'm sure N. Korea or Iran would be happy to sell us some.
Table-ized A.I.
Can they use uranium instead? I have this friend that might be able to loan them his Uranium PU-32 explosive space modulator..
Shouldn't we be building breeder reactors that make Plutonium? It might help with global warming by retiring some caol fired power plants.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMuWOLVAzYY
Table-ized A.I.
At the beginning, where Isaac describes the slowly decaying Galactic civilization; that's what the United States reads like more and more.
The signs are everywhere: Leadership that's seriously out of touch with the people; infrastructure that's still good but getting worse; dwindling education, increasing racial tension and population segregation; etc.
We remember the good old days, and the good old days WERE brighter. Technology overall still advances, but what's not advancing is our position in it. Thanks to a distinctly anti-intellectual culture and an increasing distrust of "da gubbmint" combined with a ridiculous war, our economy is in a shambles, our regulations are a mess, and our population often seems more interested in "being heard" than listening long enough to identify the problems.
I find it sad to see our nation on the decline.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Yea you've fucked us over for years and we've found something the international community will protect us against you on.
:P
But we're magnaminious, and we have the second largest supply in the world.
And the moral high ground
Why not just call Iran or North Korea? they must have a bunch of Pu-238 if they are making Pu-239
There's a real question as to whether the US still has working nuclear weapons. Much of the production capability was shut down years ago. For over a decade, the US had lost the capacity to make nuclear "pits". They used to be made at Rocky Flats, which shut down in 1993. Los Alamos now has a limited production capability for new nuclear pits, but no pit made there has been tested in an actual detonation. The complete ban on nuclear testing, even underground, means there's some doubt about whether new physics packages actually work. Current practice is to build duplicates of designs from the 1970s.
One of the non-radioactive materials for H-bombs is out of production, and attempts to make more of it have not been successful.
There's also a tritium shortage. Tritium, with its short half-life, has to be replaced periodically. That's getting to be a problem.
The second team is building these things today. Early atomic bombs were designed by Nobel prizewinners. Today, the people involved are far less qualified and not very motivated. Almost everybody who ever designed a bomb that went off has retired. There's a proposal to design a "dumber bomb" with a very long shelf life, but without testing, nobody really has confidence that would work.
They've got a critical amount of Pu-238 and they want more?
Everyone wants to blame the lack of progress at a miscegenation of the population and market, but what it all boils down to is such a self-centered country as the United States only failed recently when all the risk-management and debt collections tried to integrate slave labor and foreign interests into the country so as to elleviate much of the failures that accompanied progress. What you see today is a military industrial complex (as defined by Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower) separate itself from the pretend "free market" maintained by the civilian debtor nation. Basically what it means is the United States progressed, foreign countries continually try to cash-in on leaked progress, investments don't turn-out, so the United States bifurcates into a productive admiralty-rule self-sufficient military government at the expense of a failing populous that it only pretends into existence as a decoy to isolate enemies pursuant to the Trading With The Enemy Act (which civilians violate every day when they buy foreign-made electronics). Everything isn't real, it's all simulated: television, depressed immune system from bad water and food, the immediate response by courts over disagreements is to drug and fatigue everyone into compliance, police constantly harassing freemen for not enfranchising their family and property into the State-charter, and the Illuminati Freemasons in the Catholic Church are controlling everyone's lifestyle through municipal corporations. It's Hell on Earth, and we are taught to believe we're in Heaven on Earth.
The last one that was designed in 1968 and shut down about three years ago was an incredibly expensive French white elephant built with the idea that Uranium was going to run out quickly. There are better ways to make the stuff, as seen by what the military use to make it and by what ambitious developing nations use to make it (eg. Egypt, Indonesia and a long list of others with CANDU reactors).
I don't know why NASA doesn't just buy some left over stuff from the UK, France, South Africa, Israel, Egypt, half of Eastern Europe or as part of a non proliforation deal - North Korea.
There is a lot of plutonium of various isotopes out there. It's only the politics of pretending there isn't that get in the way of NASA getting some (plus stupid counterproductive sabre rattling in the direction of Russia - the cold war is over guys!).
You can't buy it on the private market because there is no market for it. This shit's only useful when you don't risk poisoning anyone, and when you can't use solar panels or any form of fossil fuel. In other words, it's only useful when you're as far away as Mars, and there isn't much commercing done about there.
It's created as a result of deliberate human intervention instead of being found as-is in nature. It's synthetic.
The US has been using up its existing stockpiles of Pu-238 to build RTGs for a mixture of civilian deep space projects and black intel operations such as non-solar-powered stealth spy satellites and seabed-emplaced submarine monitoring stations. The Russians agreed to sell the US some Pu-238 under a licence that prevented it being used for military functions but they shut that down when it became obvious the US was reallocating most if not all of its home-grown stockpile to the military side of things. Like oil Pu-238 is fungible and the Russian supply of Pu-238 was effectively enhancing US military capabilities.
Perhaps it's too small of quantity to be of use but why not recycle the PU-238 from the RTG's used in nuclear weapons? We've retired/dismantled several thousands of nukes that used RTG's. The RTG production is now under the Sandia National Labs & they should know whether these RTGs could be of any use to NASA's problem.
...you don't need Plutonium to make Muslims feel good about themselves, right?
I mean, since this is possibly NASA's FOREMOST mission: ... and math and engineering,"
"When I became the NASA administrator -- or before I became the NASA administrator -- (Obama) charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science
-Styopa
The agency in question is probably the NRO. So basically, it has gone from NASA into the NRO black space project.
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem delendam esse
The Indian plant is accelerated thorium which is a vastly differerent sort of plant to a plutonium fast breeder - so much so that it actually has a viable future.
I suppose people can always pretend I've given the wrong answer by changing the question, but I'll assume it wasn't deliberate because that would be extremely childish.
Good thing they still have an ample supply of ammonium phozdex.
Why cannot Ghazali be both a great thinker and responsible for long term stagnation of thinking and science?
A quote from the wikipedia page on him:
"Ijtihad is the process through which Islamic scholars can generate new rules for Muslims. Ijtihad was one of the recognized sources of Islamic knowledge by early Islamic scholars – that is, in addition to Quran, Sunnah and Qiyas. While it is not widely agreed that Ghazali himself intended to "shut the door of ijtihad" completely and permanently, such an interpretation of Ghazali's work is believed to have led Islamic societies to be "frozen in time". Works of critics of Ghazali (such as Ibn Rushd, a rationalist), as well as the works of any ancient philosopher, are believed to have been forbidden in these "frozen societies" through the centuries. As a result, all chances were lost to gradually revitalize religion – which may have been less painful had it been spread over a period of centuries."
The page goes on to wonder if stopping Ijtihad was his intention or not, but if that was the result of his actions, I think blaming him may have some ground.
Oh, I think 20 kg of high purity Pu-239 would make some individual Muslims feel very good. Specifically, Mr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. It's not HEU, but it'll sure do in a pinch.
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and a whole host of others might be less than thrilled by it, though.
This is why it's risky to rely solely on single ouside suppliers for critical items. The funding for new Pu-238 production by DOE has been held up at least in part due to the availability of it for sale by the Russians.
It's a good source and a reasonable solution, provided unforeseen problems like the contract trouble that's stopped us buying it don't come up. But, in world affairs, they sometimes do.
Unfortunately, it would take several years to start producing it again even if funding were available now.
Similarly, we're about to rely on Russia for manned transport to the ISS and don't have a backup that wouldn't take years to be ready (be it man rating the Falcon 9, or some other). Similarly, I'd not advise the Russians to rely on the US (or any other single country) as a sole source supplier for something critical either.
Countries like the US and Russia have different interests and needs that sometimes don't work out the way people expect. Outside events can push them to differences when no such was planned or foreseen.
My own preference would be to mostly rely on Soyuz as a manned laucher to the ISS, but keep a couple of shuttles running at a much lower launch rate for a back up until newer vehicles are proven. Expensive and hopefully not needed, but most insurance is like that.
My thoughts exactly. This is why Obama is so brilliant - he knew NASA would have this problem and that's why he made NASA's #1 priority mission improving relations with Muslim nations. The guy is brilliant! http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/07/06/nasa-official-walks-claim-muslim-outreach-foremost-mission/
Usually when "plutonium" and "critical" are used together in the same sentence, it isn't good.
Remember, the US government cancelled the Constellation program and post-Shuttle manned spaceflight capabilities, with the hopes that they'd *buy seats* on Russian spacecraft.
And now they can't even agree on buying some plutonium from Russians?
How many people really think that buying those seats on Russian shuttles will happen without any problems?
Face it, America gave away its manned spaceflight. Making deals with Russia can't be relied on -- even small things like plutonium can't be reliably obtained, let alone manned spaceflight through Russians.
We gave it away. And now our manned spaceflight is screwed.
how much they need. and how much money they got.