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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."
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
Pardon my ignorance and possible first post - but couldn't NASA just recycle some retiring nuke warheads for plutonium?
Oh, yes, any moron in Slashdot is a rocket scientist.
No, they can't. Nukes have Pu-239 (the fissile isotope), and they need Pu-238 (the alpha emmiter).
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
A more pressing question in my mind is why aren't there any private companies making it for NASA? Does the NRC prohibit private companies from producing it?
I'm sure somewhere in the US exists a company with the technical expertise and equipment to make it. And when I'm pretty sure companies are still willing to cash government checks... I guess I don't understand "shortages" in synthesized isotopes. I heard a while back there is another isotope synthesized in Canada that we have to buy because there isn't enough in the US or something like that. I don't get it.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
And when I'm pretty sure companies are still willing to cash government checks... I guess I don't understand "shortages" in synthesized isotopes. I heard a while back there is another isotope synthesized in Canada that we have to buy because there isn't enough in the US or something like that. I don't get it.
There are several situations like that in the US. Sure, private companies could make synthesized isotopes. We have the brainpower and tools to do it. Unfortunately we have ming-numbingly huge government red tape that gets in the way. Fines, fees, inspections, reports, surveys, permits, clearences, investigations, and on and on and on. I mean--you don't really expect the government would just /let/ someone start manufacturing nuclear anything for any reason, do you?
There's no place like
We only made it in the US at Hanford and Savannah River, both of those are shut down now.
It's very toxic, very hard to work with and very flammable and very much controlled, so thats why no private companies are in the market to produce it.
To produce Pu-238 you produce a ton of weapons grade plutonium, do we really need more of that crap churned out?
http://www.fas.org/nuke/intro/nuke/plutonium.htm
Cultural Victory? Nope.
Diplomatic Victory? Nope.
Space Race Victory? Nope.
That leaves Domination Victory and Conquest Victory.
Decisions, decisions.
You have issues dude. I identify myself as Muslim and it's a creed, but science-wise "Muslims" (Middle East) have lost it (i.e. stop being mad about it).
Yes, Algebra and Algorithm are Arabic words traced to the amazing Mohammed Ibn Musa Al-Khawarizmi (who was "Persian" btw, yes, the people we intend to bomb), and f#@king YES, India was there first.
But that doesn't take from him (or his civilization/creed) the right to call the names.
(For the purposes of this post, I will interchange creed and civilization, even though they're far-far-FAR from being the same thing).
It's a phenomenon Neil Degrasse Tyson describes as "Naming Rights" (I'm no scholar, so maybe it has another name). But basically, when a nation/region excels and innovates, they get the right to name their discoveries and they effectively "own" them.
Why is the rest of the world using .hk, .uk and .whatever domains? Why is the US the only country that enjoys .gov, .mil and .edu without a trailing .us?
Because, this s$#t was invented here, and "we"* earned it.
Jupiter, Venus, Mars, Pluto.. all Greek mythology names, why? They were "it"** back in the day.
So, what happened to the Muslim world? Well, Al-Ghazali decided to take them 300 years back into oblivion.
No scientist/mathematician/programmer/thinker/etc. would ever express prejudice. Empathy and sorrow for ignorance, maybe, but not hatred.
Now... where are we? We have racism (been to AZ lately?), prejudice (Muslim/Jew/*INSERT RELIGION* haters) and a whole lot more.
A lot of Americans do not believe in evolution or other scientifically proven facts. We kill our enemies for our "god-given" rights and we (the majority of us) want religion taught in school.
I wonder if GWB was our "Al-Ghazali", or maybe it will be Obama. Whomever it is, we must stop it and freaking move forward. Otherwise, we're fscked. We'll be the nation that our grandchildren and history talks about as "they invented XYZ, but muhahaha, look at them barbarians." And the elite nations at the time will nuke the ish out of them for being so backwards.
I want us to prevail, but with attitudes like yours and the extreme ignorance level the populace have, I'm afraid it's already too late.
I better start learning Chinese (Ni Hao) :(
And finally; to be on-topic; NASA needs to get some more of that "shiz-nit" :P
----
* I'm kind of one of you("us") now!
** A.K.A. The $h#t
If you can't mod them join them.
It's fucking plutonium. You can't just make it. Hippies freak shit when we try to build an oil refinery, much less refine nuclear material. They'll start screaming about us irradiating space or some shit and no one will make a damned thing.
Pardon my ignorance and possible first post - but couldn't NASA just recycle some retiring nuke warheads for plutonium?
Oh, yes, any moron in Slashdot is a rocket scientist.
No, they can't. Nukes have Pu-239 (the fissile isotope), and they need Pu-238 (the alpha emmiter).
Apparently actual Slashdot rocket scientists are also assholes.
- Not GP, but a rocket scientist who thought it was a reasonable question.
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.
Shouldn't we be building breeder reactors that make Plutonium? It might help with global warming by retiring some caol fired power plants.
It's fucking plutonium. You can't just make it. Hippies freak shit when we try to build an oil refinery, much less refine nuclear material.
But for some reason they don't mind turning on the lights in their home with electricity provided by coal fired generators that put more radioactive particulates in the air than any nuclear plant could.
Uh, Bechtel makes Nucular reactors
Yeah--and they have legions of people devoted to dealing with the bureaucratic red tape required by the DoE and other federal agencies. And yeah, that includes lobbyists too.
There's no place like
Actually, it looks like Russia is taking the lead in the Space Race again. The US has practically lost its ability to launch astronauts, and now its ability to power its probes is in jeopardy.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Don't care if it's off-topic, great reply man! Far too often we, as Americans, take our issues with policy and political leadership and smear it across whole swaths of culture and people. I take extreme issue with those that would cause others undue harm, especially terrorist and despot regimes, but for God's sake I don't hold their people/citizens entirely responsible unless they personally participate and prove that they deserve it.
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
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.
yes to all. At the least, we need more RD
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Hippiecrits.
Brilliant!
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
At a guess, what you're talking about is Molybdenum-99, which is a parent isotope of Technetium-99, which is a beta emitter used extensively in radiopharmaceuticals. While it is mined in the US, Canada has much bigger deposits (as do a few other places).
I needed a sig so people would know who I am, but I was too drunk to make something witty, so you get this instead.
What I can't find, and might be somewhat useful for a debate on the matter, is a table of the various isotopes of the elements and the decay heat of each.
You may have heard of that newfangled thingee called "google". When I send the words "table of nuclides" into it and hit the button "I feel lucky", it ports me to http://atom.kaeri.re.kr/ , which appears to have all the data you're asking for.
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
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.
Thanks! and I whole-heatedly agree with you!
I recently watched The Unthinkable (if you haven't watched it, it's a great movie), and as to not spoil it for anyone, all I can say is that I was sitting at the edge of my seat and rooting for Samuel Jackson throughout the movie.
Bin Laden is an a$$hole, and the 72 virgins (myth) will be well-hung top-men scavenging his and his goons' cavities while slow-roasting them to perfection (yes I hate them as much as you do, probably even more so).
The stories that have been hitting Slashdot about censorship in Pakistan and other Islamic countries gathered quite a few "look at them backwards Muslims", instead of generating empathy about the sad state of these countries.
I should know, I lived in a couple of them growing up. People are afraid for their lives and cannot speak up. People can't discuss politics in coffee shops, because that guy smoking hooka is new and he might be from internal affairs, and if he marks you, your family won't even know what happened to you (Egyptian NSA-equivalent calls it "sending someone behind the sun").
America used to be the great nation everyone there talked about. It was wonderland, where you can criticize leaders and "be alive the next day". Where your creed and background did not matter, only what you knew and what you can do.
But somehow when we started meddling with their affairs, we became the villain. There's an Arabic saying that goes something like "Me and my brother would fight my cousin if he does us wrong, but if a stranger comes in, my cousin and I will team up".
The solution is _not_ to go into these countries with military force to "spread freedom", the solution is to stand up against tyranny with words, show them an example of democracy over here and not to co-operate with their regimes to oppress people.
Final words: Any kind of zealotry (religious/nationalistic/software) is ignorant, and I hope that I see a world without hatred before my time is up here. I doubt it, but I'm still an optimist inside and one can dream.
If you can't mod them join them.
They've got a critical amount of Pu-238 and they want more?
Yes, it can be used as Pu-239 in a reactor.
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!).
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.
...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.
Empathy? According to prevailing beliefs (held by all but ignorant red-staters), the state of those countries is what the people of those countries want, and for Americans to feel that this is wrong is to be disrespectful of Islamic culture.
That assumes
1) The people can listen
2) The people will listen
3) The people will believe what we say, despite all the propaganda (much of it coming from the US itself...) painting the US as the root of all evil
4) The people, other than those at the top, matter at all.
I don't have a solution. If there was some sort of home-grown pro-freedom movement, the best the US could do is oppose it. But as far as I can tell (from 10,000+ miles away...) there isn't; the people want their chains. Not surprising; there's a lot of people in the US who want them too.
I read a great book called "The Discovery of Freedom" by Rose Wilder Lane (Little House on the Prairie). It examines the attempts at freedom through history. The First was the Moses leading the Jews to Freedom and the founding of Israel. The second was Mohammed who again wrestled control away from the churches/government and taught people to be free which lead to a spectacular civilization that lasted though the European Dark Ages. Ever wonder why the Renaissance happened in Italy and not Britain? Because they were very close and interacted with the Muslim civilization. The third was the founding of the US. It looks like our attempt at freedom will not last as long as the Muslims. It is only with freedom and liberty does civilization thrive. This book shows that freedom is not the norm. The norm is dictators, theocracy, and poverty. This looks like where we are headed. It seems people get comfortable with the luxuries freedom provides and they forget how fragile it is. People think there will always be computers and movies but history shows that once people abandon freedom and reason it is easy to slip back into the normal state of humanity which is abject poverty. http://mises.org/books/discovery.pdf
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
To produce Pu-238 you produce a ton of weapons grade plutonium, do we really need more of that crap churned out?
In a word, yes.
The US is the only major nuclear power which can't produce new plutonium pits for nuclear weapons. Further, the breeder reactors that produce plutonium could also recycle spent fuel from conventional plants into new, useful fuel.
At some point sanity will prevail and we'll vastly expand our use of nuclear energy for both power generation and space travel. At the moment though, we're stuck in enviro-Luddite hell.
This November may mark a turning point towards rationality on a lot of levels.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Umm, because the production and manufacturing processes for Plutonium are really expensive and are really toxic?
Do you know anything about Plutonium?
Some tidbits about the most toxic metal on the planet.
"It reacts with carbon, halogens, nitrogen and silicon. When exposed to moist air, it forms oxides and hydrides that expand the sample up to 70% in volume, which in turn flake off as a powder that can spontaneously ignite."
"Reactor-grade plutonium from spent nuclear fuel contains various isotopes of plutonium. Pu-238 makes up only a percent or two, but may be responsible for much of the short-term decay heat because of its short halflife. This is not useful for producing Pu-238 for RTGs because difficult isotopic separation would be needed."
100 kg of reactor fuel will produce about 400g of Pu-238 after three years.
The coal plants are far away, like the coal which powers them. Coal-fired power plants have no place in the popular imagination (any more), so public awareness is low.
They don't bother the hippies any more than mountaintop removal mining, which only displaces Red State hicks they despise anyway.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Pu-238 occurs as an unavoidable contaminant in breeder reactors. However, what would seem the most obvious technique to get it, enriching it straight out of the main Pu-239 product isotopically, U-235/U-238 style, is always going to be extremely difficult- what with the ridiculous centrifuges and mass spectrometry that prevent everyone with an axe to grind from becoming a nuclear power.
Luckily another contaminant, U-236, is also formed when the small amount of contaminant U-235 present in the initial yellowcake acquires a neutron in the breeder reactor to become U-236 with a ten million year half life (before it spontaneously fissions after humans are extinct). If it captures a second stray neutron in there before that happens eons from now, then it beta decays to Np-237 with a half life of one week, but that means we get extra electron to grab onto! A [suicidal] high school chemistry class could then isolate this neptunium from the plutonium, easily within a few days (to reach the deadline).
After you have so easily isolated the pure neptunium (and buried the dead chemists), you just shine more neutrons on it, and voila, you get alpha emitter Pu-238 with a half life of 90 years. (Before it decays to "stable" U-234 which has its own half life of 27000 years making it someone else's problem.) Cram a thermoelectric generator full of Pu-238 and hold it at arms length from your electronic toys, and you've got a nice battery that lasts for decades for trips outside the solar system.
For a neutron source, spontaneous fission will usually suffice, certainly for civilian or nuclear reactors. But when timing is absolutely critical, a more reliable neutron source can be made from an emitter of fast alpha particles (Pu-238, Ra-226, Po-210, whatever) irradiating beryllium-9. The alpha particle has an inelastic collision with the beryllium which produces a carbon-12 nucleus and a fast neutron- or a thermal neutron if it keeps bouncing off carbon and beryllium nuclei. Fast neutrons pack more energy if they hit and can overcome kinetic barriers to fuse with nuclei, but slow ones spend more time poking around nuclei and may even tunnel through barriers. Whether you want fast or slow depends on how you have arranged the fuel, the moderator, and any neutron absorbent or reflective materials in your device.