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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?
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.
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
The US was in on the industry, remember the entire Nuclear Weapon Complex the US had/has from Savannah River to Oak Ridge to Pantex to Rocky Flats to Los Alamos to Hanford?
Plutonium is a pain to produce, clean up and deal with.
Cultural Victory? Nope.
Diplomatic Victory? Nope.
Space Race Victory? Nope.
That leaves Domination Victory and Conquest Victory.
Decisions, decisions.
Also, at the time they were producing Plutonium, it was taking almost 10% of the power the country was generating at the time.
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?
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.
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.
That in itself doesn't say very much, does it?
Have you ever seen a typical home that hasn't been touched since the late 40's-50's? It had a refrigerator, a radio everyone huddled around, a single light bulb and one outlet in each room (there being very few rooms to begin with), if you were fortunate--two outlets if you're very lucky. They didn't have central air, or big screens TVs and computers humming along all day, burning through thousands upon thousands of kWh.
I see that 10% number float around from time to time. Don't know where it comes from, or if it's remotely accurate at all--but if I had to guess: should we undertake *ALL* of that energy research and weapon building today, it would be dwarfed compared to the country's power bill for A/C alone.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
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?
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.
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
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.
I didn't think I could make more clear than putting it in the subject line.
New plutonium? Please also note that EBR-II is a late 1950's design that went live in 1965 and ACTUALLY RAN ON URANIUM.
If you are going to try to correct people please learn about your subject matter.
Liquid sodium reactors are a dead end technology until somebody solves the problem of liquid metal embrittlement in areas with a lot of voiding from neutron damage. If you have an answer to that, then sure go ahead and push that wheelbarrow - but for everyone else the lessons from the 1970s were very clear that it's either a roadblock to overcome before any more reactors of that type are built or a dead end.
I really wish nuclear advocates would learn about the new and interesting stuff instead of the dreams of the 1950s.