Slashdot Mirror
Developing Nuclear Power Plant Tech For the Moon and Mars
With his first accepted Slashdot submission, Zandamesh sends this excerpt from ZDNet: "On earth, nuclear reactors are under attack because of concerns over damage caused by natural disasters. In space, however, nuclear technology may get a new lease on life. Plans for the first nuclear power plant for the production of electricity to be used by manned or unmanned bases on the Moon, Mars and other planets have been unveiled at the 242nd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society. 'The reactor itself may be about 1 ½ feet wide by 2 ½ feet high, about the size of a carry-on suitcase. There are no cooling towers. ... The team is scheduled to build a technology demonstration unit in 2012."
While possibly a good idea, be prepared for the protesters. Specifically the group that complains every time a rocket blasts off carrying fissile material. What if it explodes on launch?
Also, expect a few wingnuts who complain about ruining the pristine landscape of the moon.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
If they would just cover Mars where the Sun shines, with Solar power facilities, they would generate as much energy, if not more, and they wouldn't have to worry about any messy nuclear waste or negative press. So the interesting part of this discovery is that back in the 1950's when there were all the sci-fi movies about Martians attacking us and sending probes up our you-know-whats, the reality is we will be likely sending an army of robots to Mars to do our bidding!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
So, in case of an accident we remove the possibility of nuclear radiation poisoning, but now we have the threat of General Zod, Ursa, and Non.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
Yeah, most environmentalists won't care about operating a nuclear reactor on Mars (some will of course. Loonies are loonies), but many (very, very many) will bitch and moan to no end about launching nuclear material on rockets in case they explode. Right now it isn't so much of an issue (because, well, most people don't know we do it and we don't do it often) but if it enters public consciousness you can expect a massive backlash against it, and no set of statistics about how safe the rockets are will stop it, just like no set of statistics convinces them nuclear reactors are one of the safest power sources in existence and cause far fewer health issues than coal (hell, even solar has more deaths than nuclear, simply because of rooftop installations. source)
I'm not saying launching massive amounts of nuclear material on rockets is necessarily a good idea, but no matter how safe it'll never get off the ground once people hear about it. So unless we start mining Uranium or Thorium off planet, don't expect this to become a widespread source of power on Mars anytime soon.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Maybe for Earth, but solar energy is not viable for long-term use on a world in which night lasts for two weeks.
Sending a bunch of solar cells to the moon is easy. It's launching the batteries that's the dealbreaker at current launch costs. If you need lots of baseline power in a small package, nuclear's the only viable tech.
Ditto for Mars - not just because it's further away, but because soft-landing a lot of mass on Mars is arguably more difficult than landing on the Moon. Not just due to gravity, but Mars' atmosphere is dense enough to burn up a spacecraft, but not dense enough to avoid the requirement for colossal parachutes or really fancy retro-rocket landing systems.
There's already quite a bit of radiation in space, couldn't that be somehow harvested to provide power?
~Syberz
Solar power is hardly "readily available" on the moon, unless Bob's Discount Solar Panels has relocated their manufacturing complex on the moon.
Solar panels have weight. I am going to guess that the kilowatts per pound for solar doesn't come anywhere near nuclear.
Solar panels degrade over time. You then have to launch all new panels. The reactor mass for nuclear would stay on the moon, you just send up more fuel.
You're concerned about losing it on launch? First, launch it over the ocean, like we do for pretty all US launches. Second, these reactors are pretty small. You can put launch abort systems on them. You can encase it in a lot of shielding. More than enough to survive a ballistic ocean crash.
Even if you do lose the thing, it is a small reactor. It will have a limited amount of fissionable material. You could dump it in the ocean and it would affect no one.
I don't see how traditional cooling towers would work for anything in a vacuum, as they're designed as heat exchangers against ambient air, and use convection to draw fresh air in for dumping waste heat into, exhausting it out the top...
If anything, they'd need to do a geothermal-style ground-loop system, where they drill several boreholes, plumb them with loops, and then fill in the extra space with the regolith they originally bored out. Use the ground as a heatsink for the hot water from the secondary exchanger, possibly switching between several ground loops depending on how well the heat dissipates and how quickly a given area is saturated.
On the other hand, if this technology can be developed, then we'll have the vaunted suitcase nuke always talked about, albeit with a significantly different function than normally ascribed...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The lack of air means they are going to have trouble dumping heat. From the picture I'm guessing big radiative heatsinks will be used. The temperature gradient will be much less than could be easily obtained on earth via water or even convective cooling. I am not a nuclear engineer but having had thermo I suspect that this difference in heat dumping ability would work its way back into the reactor design as well. I also remember from thermo that heat engines are always more efficient as they get bigger, so the size and weight constraints this design has would make for a very wasteful use of our resources here on earth.
I do however think that we need to have next-gen nuclear plants in our array of power sources.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
I was going to post a witty Starcraft reference, but how are we going to *safely* extract and enrich (or ship in a rocket) uranium in outer space?
It's a political non-starter
You are assuming, of course, that it would be launched from a country whose political leaders give a damn about that sort of thing. Last time I looked all of the places that cave to NIMBY whiners don't have any money to launch such a thing, so it is a moot point.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
There are no cooling towers. ...
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
There is not going to be a nuclear car. Period.
I mean seriously, haven't you ever heard of car crashes? Haven't you heard of retarded people already stealing radioactive sources and spreading them around because "they were looking for scrap"??
Cars have to go electric, with its advantages and disadvantages. What we need is more nuclear power plants to supply these electric vehicles *safely* and efficiently, not having radioactive sources driving around and getting salvaged by retards or worse.
PS. What is great for continuous power over 50 years for the Moon or Mars, is not exactly efficient and great for Earth. Conventional nuclear power plants are more efficient due to economies of scale - they provide massively larger amount of power when connected to even larger grid.
No atmosphere = no natural disasters my ass.
It's always confirmation bias!
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpaceIsCold
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Yeah, I got that part. I was marveling that anyone would even reasonably expect cooling towers, AT ALL in a vacuum. Slashdot is a fairly educated crowd, and I'd figure that most readers would know that they wouldn't work.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The article mentions why solar was ruled out. Battery weight was one of them.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
I wondered about this, but I'm concerned that the rock types might not be very conductive, or even have a very high specific heat in the absence of water. Pumice for instance would make a terrible heat sink.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
In order to get a reactor to the moon you have to launch it on a rocket, and rockets do not have a really great safety record.
The reactor doesn't start up until it's in place, so it's relatively safe until then. Plus if the launcher fails after the first minute or so it ends up at the bottom of the ocean.
The Russians have put reactors into space before, and I believe NASA did launch one before they settled on RTG and solar.
We have already sent nuclear generators into space.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
This is exactly what is needed. Not just for space, but to help restart American innovation.No, lets do more like this.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Is this really any easier or safer if there are plans for humans to ever be on that body again?
You do realise that space is so full of radiation that any long-term base on the Moon or Mars will probably need to be buried a few feet under the ground, right?
A nuke plant the size of a CARRY-ON SUITCASE. I don't see any problems with that getting into the wrong hands...
Before we even think about a permanent lunar settlement we need to think about lunar mining to extract iron, aluminum, copper, and uranium ore.
Then we need to work on solar (parabolic or fresnel) furnaces to melt the ore and process it into metal. The lack of oxygen will make some of the traditional smelting techniques more difficult however. We may have to live with metals with inferior properties because we have to invent a whole new metallurgy up there.
Having a working nuclear reactor there in the beginning would make everything a lot easier. I don't know if photovoltaics could supply enough power for things like earth (regolith) moving machinery.
In the beginning we could limit ourselves to collecting the loose regolith with solar powered bulldozers, backhoes, and more specialized mining equipment. For the heavier minerals underneath we'd have to wait for a higher power density solution.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
It's from the article, where they discuss how different this reactor is from the public stereotypes of a nuclear reactor.
(Although as we all know, cooling towers are hardly unique to nuclear reactors.)
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Is this really any easier or safer if there are plans for humans to ever be on that body again?
You do realise that space is so full of radiation that any long-term base on the Moon or Mars will probably need to be buried a few feet under the ground, right?
So what's worse - your default space radiation or some enriched nuclear fuel lying around or able to find its way inside your systems? One you know you have to deal with - the other you potentially have to deal with and it's way messier and much less predictable.
So what's worse - your default space radiation or some enriched nuclear fuel lying around or able to find its way inside your systems?
The radiation from nuclear fuel is negligible compared to the radiation from solar flares which can kill you in a few minutes.
Night on the moon lasts for about two weeks. This means that, during the two weeks of sunlight, you'd have to generate and store enough power to last you two weeks, on top of the power that you were using normally. That's going to require a lot of batteries...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
there is a "dark side", and it's everywhere......you do realize that the length of the average "day" and "night" on the moon is two weeks? the batteries needed will be bigger than a nice little nuclear reactor
That is a pretty big back yard you have. Doing the lawn must be tiresome.
Rethinking email
you're silly, a reactor could melt into slag on the moon and it would make no difference, the rad levels on the moon can reach tens of severts. That's thousands of REM for us old-schoolers, lethal dose. same as standing on refueling deck of a running reactor, you'd be dead in minutes
I think that we should do some more R&D into using beta- emitters. In particular, if there is a lot of nuclear waste that can provide this power. And heat can be use for local heating. The big issue is that neutrons are emitted and have to be dealt with. However, if this is done, then we are looking at a nice way to provide power for even VASIMR, and perhaps for ships, larger earth movers, etc.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
No you are wrong.
Do you know how much naturally accuring uranium is in the ocean? The answer is many tons. If you eat sea salt on your food you are eating Uranium along with Boron and Strontium, Uranium is natural and is found in many places all over the earth. A few kg of uranium falling into the sea or burning up in the atmosphere would be as close to harmless as modern math can get you. Unless you get hit by a piece. That is assuming they use uranium like most other reactors use. Spent fuel is dangerous if not contained. If they do not "turn on" the reactor until it is on the moon it will be very close to harmless.
Second, solar is not readily available on the moon. Maybe you have never looked at the moon but it doesn't get continuous sun light. In fact it is in darkness for about 50% of the time. Anything left on the moon will have days of no light lots of cold to deal with.
Why do people post in authoritative, fear and ignorance so quickly. I would love to see someone post, "is there any increased danger to doing this", verses this type of fear mongering.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Actually not really. The people that live near the Cape will be fine with it. The protesters tend to come from out of town. As someone that lives near the cape and has for my entire life I can say. IMBY.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
You just wait until the space quakes hit, and all that radiation is released, contaminating space with radiation for years to come.
That said, this is very old news. This type of thing has existed and has been in use for half a century. However these are pretty low powered devices (unless this is supposed to be different), that only produce like 500W of power over a period of 80 years or so. So depending on what you plan on using these for power at these "bases", it is not like they are going to power everything. Perhaps they mean the idea is to use multiple of these, which might make sense for redundancy reasons.
The real merit of TFA is it state for the large audience there is no energy source out there strong enough to sustain human life beyond nearer planets. So, we can conclude that old dream to colonize the space beyond the solar system is extincted once and for all, provided a trip to the nearest solar system is a 40000 years journey and even if we can manage to protect the life from the cosmic rays on an hypothetical ship, we still have the energy problem to sustain life, even in hibernation state.
Also, is there a benefit to export energy sources from Earth to Moon and Mars in an hypothetical scenario where we believe something worth to be exploited there?
Don't we have an energy problem here in the forthcoming years? On a small scale, that may be acceptable for the stake of science, on a large scale for resources digging it is a completely other matter.
Achille Talon
Hop!
TFA is remarkably light on details. The ZDnet article refers to the SNAP-10A satellite, which had a 45 kWt reactor that produced 650 watts of electrical power via thermoelectric converters, which is not much for a device that's about the same size as this new proposal. If they want to produce 40 KWe from a small package, some other technology may be needed.
This is beginning of something far more important than nuclear power: Microwave Transmission.
Implicit Evaluation with PHP
No I don't mean did they put one of these on the moon (and certainly not mars, I don't think any of their landers made it).
No, I mean didn't they have a bunch of high powered satellites in earth orbit that used reactors (NOT just RTGs, they wouldn't produce enough power). I believe they were radar satellites that scanned the oceans looking for American carrier groups to kill. (The U.S. really has a HUGE advantage in its many bases and allies worldwide, this is something that required the soviets to create satellites like this. It is an advantage that will also take the Chinese a very long time, if ever, to match). In fact didn't one of their satellites COSMOS I think it was, crash in Canada spewing plutonium all over the place and costing millions to clean up?
That said, if the design is sound (the spacecraft malfunctioned not the reactor right?), wouldn't it be easy to adapt their zero-gee design to work on the moo or mars? Should actually be easier, gravity will let convection work and (on mars) the thin atmosphere will help the purely radiative cooling.
Isn't it something like -200 degrees F outside of direct sunlight in space? I'm not an engineer, but do you really need anything more than passive cooling of circulating coolant and a big reflector?
Nuclear power as employed now is not truly clean, but doesn't mean it can't be if new reactor designs were built.
The problem with nuclear power as I see it is that if there's ever an accident the response is "Don't build any more power stations!" instead of "Build newer*, safer stations and decommission the old ones."
*i.e. basic designs that aren't older than I am. If you want a car analogy, try this: carburettors could only take the automobile so far; to make progress we had to ditch the whole concept and move to fuel injection. The results were much cleaner and more efficient than the old method could ever have been.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
Think a little bigger, a couple of moon bases. You create an electricity grid. The moon isn't that big. If you're gone live near one of the poles, the necessary length is much shorter.
On the moon, sunlight is pure and unadulterated. No atmosphere, no pesky clouds. No problem with less light at higher latitudes.
Bert
There is not going to be a nuclear car. Period.
- too bad you are an AC, it would have been great to point out the stupidity of your post in the future to nuclear car drivers.
Just because you think you know what the future holds based on the current status quo and your agenda absolutely does not mean that you are in any way right.
People said all sorts of things in the past about tech that couldn't possibly happen - why, we are not birds, we can't fly, and if we did, we'd fall out of the sky and be crashed. We can't go too fast, faster than a galloping horse, right? Because people going that fast will just go mental and die from panic.
Yes, we will have nuclear reactors in our cars. Those will be different reactors than what you are used to and crashing will not be an issue, and even if there is a crash, the nuclear reactor can be contained in a strong enough metal casing.
Nuclear is absolutely necessary and it can be used safely even now for industrial purposes (cranes/excavators/bulldozers/heavy trucks) if not in the cars right away.
You can't handle the truth.
Who says anything about rods? As I said: you are stuck in yesterday's technology and yesterday's thinking. This needs to get out of government jurisdiction and it needs to go back where it belongs - the private sector working on ways to deliver nuclear power in small packages.
You can't handle the truth.
rockets do not have a really great safety record.
What do you mean? Sure, SOMETIMES they fail spectacularly, but have you actually looked at the safety records? Can you quote me failed launches vs launch attempt stats? Airplanes also tend to fail spectacularly. That doesn't stop them from being the safest way to travel long distances.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The moon isn't small. As balls of rock in the solar system go, it's a big one. It's bigger than Pluto. It's not that far off from the size of Mercury.
The moon has a radius of about 1080 miles. since I doubt we're going to run electricity through the center of the moon, We're more concerned with surface distance. It's circumference is just shy of 6800 miles.
6800 miles is more than twice the distance from NY to LA. That's one hell of a long extension cord.
There is not dark side of the moon, really. As a matter of fact, it is all dark.
If there's a part of the Moon that's "permanently sun-illuminated", it's news to the rest of the natural world.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Yeah let's put a reactor on the moon. Though it has a lot to do with the gravitational pull on our oceans and our tides what could possibly go wrong? (cut to the earth being sling shot into the sun or worse out of orbit. Would I rather burn to death, freeze to death or drown?)
Thermal store in the ground is an alternative to batteries, if you have a solar thermal system. You also can build vacuum gap-based capacitors (inefficient, but don't require mass from Earth, if you're already bending metal on the Moon).
Also, there's probably situations where you can stop doing stuff for two weeks (say a robotic mining operation or automated monitoring station). Still probably have to keep the stuff warm, but there are other alternatives than batteries for that.
Some of the weird Martian chemistry (particularly the presence of perchlorates) may mean you can make some sort of battery using local materials.
Solar panels have weight. I am going to guess that the kilowatts per pound for solar doesn't come anywhere near nuclear.
Currently, it depends on the amount of power generated. Solar trumps nuclear for small installations. I think nuclear "batteries" beat solar on the small end, but cost a bundle so there are options.
The Russians have put reactors into space before, and I believe NASA did launch one before they settled on RTG and solar.
More to the point, the both the Americans and Russians have put a bunch of reactors on the sea floor in the past. Hardly optimal, but not the end of the world.
And the proposed are reactors and much, much less dangerous than the naval ones. Smaller by several orders of magnitude. (Although I didn't see power factors in the article that I read, they have to be fairly small compared to a ship powering one).
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Moon. No atmosphere. No hydrosphere. No biosphere.
This nuke could explode and you'd have a bunch of small lumps of uranium spread over a few tens of metres, increasing local background radiation at that spot by a few percent. A nuclear waste dump on the moon would be open dumping in a small crater, marked with a small flashing beacon so you can find it again because you'd have to be on top of it before you can detect it.
Space. Totally different game.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
This thing better come bundled with FIOS... There's not much to do up there, and I will need to get mah Counterstrike on!
LFTRs advantages:
There are also abundant levels of Thorium on the lunar near-side
The base concepts of the LFTR were desinged in the late 50's by Alvin Weinberg for a nuclear airplane design. Further refinements of the molten salt concept were tested very successfully for four years (1964-1969) at Oak Ridge National Lab.
The project was eventually discontinued because the molten-salt reactors can't be used to produce weapons-grade plutonium and they are very safe relative to almost any other reactor and made fast breeder reactors look bad. LFTR reactors could be mass produced and delivered on trucks, from 100kw to multi-gigawatts.
A LFTR the size of an 18 wheeler should deliver at least 100kw.
The quantity of Thorium on Earth is thought to be enough to power the planet at the current rate for approximately 100,000 years.
Why not fund LFTR research at NASA while they are at it? The Chinese have already restarted all of our original research. If they create a good reactor and patent it we will feel like total idiots.
Energy From Thorium: here
On why more of the stuff is not being sent off world. If you are not in complete denial about how bad Fukushima is, then the prospect of doubling the number of reactors, many of which will be controlled by the likes of India and China, makes you a bit pessimistic about life on Earth.
Might as well use the same technology to place some flags on the outskirts of the solar system that can be discovered by other civilizations and warn them not to go near the radioactive hell hole, or what will be left of it, on the 3rd rock from the sun . . .
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
Who says anything about rods? As I said: you are stuck in yesterday's technology and yesterday's thinking. This needs to get out of government jurisdiction and it needs to go back where it belongs - the private sector working on ways to deliver nuclear power in small packages.
Someone set us up the bomb!
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
It must be fun to live in your batshit crazy libertarian world.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
See above and likely below. Space isn't hot or cold, it's vacuum (pretty much). You only have radiative cooling.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Yeah, I totally forgot to bring up the battery issue. That is easily the biggest problem with solar on the moon. Batteries are very heavy and charging them efficiently is difficult.
So you would need a baseline number of panels to generate power during the 2 weeks of light. Then you need more panels to charge the batteries for 2 weeks, to last the 2 weeks of darkness. But due to losses of charging, you probably need double the number of panels you need during the periods of light, just to charge the batteries.
You probably need like 4 times or more the number of solar panels of your base, sunlit installation. Plus tons of batteries. And oh yeah, batteries degrade pretty quickly over time as well.
Or one small reactor.
Maybe for Earth, but solar energy is not viable for long-term use on a world in which night lasts for two weeks.
Sending a bunch of solar cells to the moon is easy. It's launching the batteries that's the dealbreaker at current launch costs. If you need lots of baseline power in a small package, nuclear's the only viable tech.
Ditto for Mars - not just because it's further away, but because soft-landing a lot of mass on Mars is arguably more difficult than landing on the Moon. Not just due to gravity, but Mars' atmosphere is dense enough to burn up a spacecraft, but not dense enough to avoid the requirement for colossal parachutes or really fancy retro-rocket landing systems.
Really? Why don't you try using your imagination, instead of echoing tired-ass, discredited memes? Oh wait, you are an AC. The day/night argument against solar power goes away when you put the collector in orbit and use microwaves to transfer the energy. The day/night argument is fucking stupid and has been for about half a century, now.
Putting a solar collection/conversion facility in a Lissajous near the L2 Lagrangian and beaming the energy to where you need it on the surface of the Moon/Mars solves all the problems you associate with solar power, elegantly and simply. Bonus points for assembling the power station in situ at the L2. Imagination is a really cool thing, you know -- more important than knowledge, according to a certain egghead...
In order to get a reactor to the moon you have to launch it on a rocket, and rockets do not have a really great safety record. The risk/benefit trade-off of launching nuclear fuel through our atmosphere does not seem to be worth it, not when solar energy on the Moon is a readily available alternative.
I don't buy your first argument at all. Why would you have to launch the material on a rocket in the first place? Why does it even have to be launched from the Earth at all? There might be a need to launch some reactors to bootstrap industry on the Moon, but the materials for making these reactors could also be derived entirely from Lunar materials.
On top of that, the reactor and the fissile material don't have to be shipped together, and the fissile material can be put into storage containers which can survive a rocket explosion and have such safety protection that you really don't ever have to worry about its loss. Material sent up in that manner might even be recovered and sent on another attempt even if the rocket blew up completely in a situation like the Challenger disaster.
Also, solar energy, while abundant on the Moon, is not available for the roughly 14 "earth day" nights on the Moon. You might be able to get some photovoltaic cells to generate electricity from "earthshine" assuming you were at an area of the Moon which faced the Earth, but it would be a fair bit less than sunshine. There is a real role for this to play. No doubt that solar panels will still be used on the Moon for an additional power source, but you need a "baseline power" generator which can be de-coupled from the current daylight conditions.
You can also shut things down for the lunar night. You'll need to keep some things warm, if you do, but they need not be batteries.
For locals near the Cape, a launch is the sound of money being poured into the area. Yeah, I can see why the locals don't mind the launches and besides the marshes around the Cape are real pretty too.
The temperature of space has little to do with it. But yes, that's one way to deal with waste heat. You run coolant or a heatpipe or whatever to a heat-sink and the heat eventually gets radiated away as blackbody radiation. It doesn't actually need to be too large, because the rate of radiation is proportional to the fourth power of the temperature. So you just need a heatsink that won't melt before it reaches equilibrium between radiation and waste heat input. There are many factors to consider. First, you want a high melting point. Second, you want a high emissivity (all materials radiate the same wavelengths at the same temperature, but not the same amount). Third, you don't want it to warp due to thermal shock, so it needs to be thin, so it needs to be rigid and (somewhat) strong at operating temperatures. Fourth, you don't want it to sublimate away into space too fast or you'll need to replace it often. (All materials will sublimate into space, it's just usually extremely slow unless they're very hot) I don't know offhand which material is usually considered the best balance between those things. But usually spaceship and such don't get THAT hot to require a very hot heat-sink, so concerns over sublimation and melting can be ignored and you just make it out of copper or something.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Spent fuel rods are not really a problem. They can be reprocessed, sent through breeder reactors, and if they are being efficiently used the half lives of the final by-products are on the order of mere weeks or months, not even years.
The way most nuclear power plants are designed at the moment is like operating an internal combustion engine with a lousy design.... sort of like the original Newcomen steam engine. The design works after a fashion, but the efficiency is lousy and the ideas could be considerably refined to do a much better job.
The one problem with breeder reactor designs and facilities reprocessing nuclear materials on the scale to get rid of these "spent fuel rods" is more political than technical. Any facility capable of safely disposing spent nuclear reactor fuel rods in this fashion is also easily capable of enriching nuclear isotopes to produce "bomb grade" fissile material. What is more, as you get the techniques down for reprocessing the fuel rods, it becomes even cheaper and easier to make the bombs. You can put some procedural safeguards to keep that from happening, but it would have to be a government which does not want bombs to be made at that facility which goes out of their way to ensure it won't happen. Essentially, it is purely a political question in terms of if we want the materials safely disposed in exchange for perhaps widespread availability of bomb-grade materials.
France has been doing this reprocessing for many years, and it has been done experimentally at the Idaho National Laboratory facilities for some time as well. If you dig around, there is even a really cool 60 Minutes news report which shows the details of this reprocessing.... which is about as "mainstream media" as you can get with stuff like this.
The whole theater with Yucca Mountain in Nevada is just for show to make 3rd world countries fear reactors so they won't try to build that reprocessing facility. For governments without a nuclear bomb, building these plants is a huge temptation. Then again, why do you think Iran is building one of these reprocessing plants right now?
At the equator, you will have 30 days of sun followed by 30 days of darkness. There are some spots on the lunar poles that are thought will provide about 98-99% light. Still, you can not move far from it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
So what's worse - your default space radiation or some enriched nuclear fuel lying around or able to find its way inside your systems?
What's worse is never going there at all because you don't have a reliable, practical means of generating power for life support and manufacturing. Nuclear is the best tech we've got right now for off world colonies. Maybe some day we will develop something better, but for now it's all we've got.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
I've seen lemons and potatoes used as batteries for clocks. Why don't we just set up some groves and farms on the moon/mars and use those instead. Now that's imaginative!
Cool post bro, highfive \o
This is all pretty interesting, but one thing you said has me stumped:
"waste heat can be used to purify water (important on moon)" ... If there's much water on the Moon, what microbes are contaminating it? ... If there's water on the Moon that we brought there via space rocket, why didn't we purify it beforehand? Why would we ship non-potable water to the Moon? ... and, important why? What are we going to need purified water for? I guess there are some instruments and chemical reactions that require purified water, but aside from scientific purposes what would we need purified water on the Moon for in the first place? Not like people are actually going to live on Moon bases. They'll be populated by machines.
I really wish people would stop dreaming after sci-fi and escapist fantasies and put their amazing intellectual abilities to solving real problems that face us on Earth.
We're never going to live on other planets. It's not going to happen. At the most, we're just going to send autonomous, robotic mining operations to those places. Considering the complexity of designing the autonomous space faring systems we'd need to get the refined products back to Earth, it's likely there'll still be space cadet rocket-man jobs for people to enjoy, if being sterilized and living in a efficient, tiny metal pod for months at a stretch is your idea of fun. Again, reasons why we'll probably either come up with ways to automate space-faring or just give up on it entirely.
I'll never understand how people older than eight are so ridiculously excited by the idea of living on another planet, and would so readily waste significant portions of Earth's remaining resources on these pursuits.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Save the Whales no nukes on the moon!!!!
Didn't anybody watch where all that nuclear waste is stored on the Dark side of the moon which causes a chain reaction blowing the moon out of orbit??!!!.....
That and the area around the Cape has one of the highest average education levels in the nation. They do not tend to be taken in by false FUD.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Iran could offer up these types of "Backyard New Clear Reactors" to anyone for a "Wal-Mart" price. Then Iran could sit back and watch the U.N.Security Council cough up a world class hair ball.
You don't even need to put the solar collectors near L2; the poles of the Moon have points called "peaks of eternal light" or somesuch, and have constant sunlight. Why not just put your solar collectors there?
For solar power on Earth, yes, orbital facilities make a lot of sense. You can have sunlight 24/7, and you also avoid the atmosphere, which greatly attenuates the incoming sunlight.
(I'm actually a little surprised to find someone so under informed on Slashdot.
The Eagles used nuclear engines and everything was fine with them. Never seen one going mushroom or chinese syndrome, even if they managed to explode, crash and burn rather spectacularly.
Geeks are so full of shit that "beating the crap out of them" takes a whole new meaning.
correction - The only problem with breeder reactor designs and facilities reprocessing nuclear materials on the scale to get rid of these "spent fuel rods" is more PROFITABLE than technical.
We actually know how to build much better fission reactors (as in simpler, less dangerous, burns raw fuel and far more completely to the tune of 99% vs 1%, scales well, creates very little waste, doesn't require high pressure or active cooling, and with a salt plug has passive shutdown) that utilities won't develop because they want to make money selling nuclear weapons grade uranium to the government and reprocessed rods back to nuclear reactors.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor.
The aliens are really going to blow us up now! LOL These pinheads that are against nuke power (or just about anything other than rubbing two sticks together) just need to STFU! That Voyager probe we launched when I was in high school, and we just recently lost contact with...what do you think it was powered with D-cells from a flashlight (torch)? It has a nuke powerplant, and ran for over 30 years, and is STILL providing power. Nuke power is reliable, IF the design is correct, and PROCEDURES followed to a T. Three Mile Island? Procedure ignored. Chernobyl? Old style reactor not produced anywhere but there. Japan's problem? Placing the stupid backup power generator where it could be flooded. See a common problem? Stupidity. In the case of the Japanese problem, the designer/builder told them not to do it that way. Unless they discover a more robust supply of dead dinosaurs/trees somewhere to extract the oil from their decay, you anti nuke types better get use to the idea of NUCLEAR power. The wind does not always blow, and the sun doesn't always shine. In the USA, we've had nuke power on ships & subs for over 50 years without ANY problems.
I would like to see the techincal details on this, in particular the damage the neutrons and gamma rays escaping the reactor would do to the alloys. Many become brittle in reactors with water to moderate most of the neutrons and some of the energy form the gamma rays.
I am guessing that these guys have information on this, and Im not implying that they didnt take this into account, I am just curious how they plan to account for it and how it might change the maintenance and life cycle of the plants parts.
unless you take RadAway, er, this stuff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-Androstenediol
I'd totally have one in my back yard! It'd be more than enough to power my house, and run some back to the grid as well.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Exactly. Some months ago there was an article about an errant satellite in geostationary orbit, and the submitter suggested sending the shuttle up to fix it. The submitter obviously hadn't considered the fuel requirements to put something as heavy as a crewed space shuttle to that high of an orbit, nor had the submitter accounted for the lack of launch vehicle to even put something that massive into that orbit.
But, on the other hand, a lot of people immediately pounced, citing the relevant math and why this wasn't going to work. Had this been talking heads on a 24 hour news station, they would have figured they'd solved the world's problems that day, while failing to understand the most basic problems in attempting what they'd be discussing. And, the viewers would have started bugging their congresscritters about why they hadn't sent the shuttle to do that thing that the talking heads brought up.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Missions to other planets seem perfect opportunities to power with solar satellites. Orbit the planet with the vehicle that got there from Earth, with comms relays and telemetry for sensing/guiding expeditions on the planet's surface. Spread out huge solar collector surfaces in orbit, and beam the energy down to the surface in microwaves to ground based collectors. A lot of these materials can be gathered on the surface of the remote planet, its moons, the Earth's Moon, asteroids, etc.
It's a great way to power the mission at the other planet. And it's a great way to research the technology to use back in Earth orbit. Why launch heavy, dangerous, irreplaceable materials all the way out of our gravity well, when we can get really good at using what's plentiful out there - and around here.
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make install -not war
You're stupid. No one's against "just about anything other than rubbing two sticks together". Some people are against taking ever more excessive risks with nukes. They get into the hands of bad guys (Pakistan, N Korea, the Soviets, who knows who else), cause lots of serious pollution even when being "responsibly and peacefully" industrialized, and occasionally poison a quarter of Japan or Europe. The same people you admit are stupid are the people who will continue to deliver the nukes for this mission, and for nuke power or weapons around the world.
I'm not going to bother shooting down each of your tired, trite nuke fetish talking points. I'll just point out that you're stupid, and that you should shut the fuck up.
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make install -not war
Interesting stuff, it supposedly boosts the immune system (mainly by making white blood cells and platlets) after damage by gamma rays. However, won't help a person receiving hundreds or thousands of whole body REM exposure, as too many cell deaths make entire systems fail. Old joke at the nuke plant, if you're going to get a thousand REM go for ten thousand because nervous system shuts down and you won't suffer.
And 180 degrees opposite you have the same, but on when the other is off. And there are the poles, where you can put a couple of collectors and use 98%+98% for nearly full power all of the time, and nearly double full power nearly all of the time.
Then you network them in a microwave network via satellite reflectors. Presto: a solar network with no downtime, that can reach nearly anywhere on the Moon. Pretty cheap, too, especially if you make the collectors out of pressed moondust.
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make install -not war
The problem with those peaks of eternal light is that they are at the poles. it's a lot easier to get things on and off the moon at it's equator because anything launched there gets a boost from the moon's spin. Plus technically they aren't peaks of eternal light because very occasionally they do fall in the Earth's shadow so you would have to plan for that.
With that said, they would still make awesome places for a moon base if you ask me.
I think you're a little confused. The so-called "dark side" of the moon is just the half of the moon that is always facing away from us, which had never been seen before we started firing things off into space. It gets just as much sunlight as the other half (very slightly more, actually, since it's not eclipsed by the Earth). When it's dark on the side of the moon we can see, it's day on the "dark side" and when there's a full moon, the "dark side" actually is dark.
I should add to this that the dark side of the moon is actually only about 41% of the moon. The moons orbit is slightly elliptical, so it appears to tilt slightly side to side from our viewpoint. Another fun moon fact is that the moons orbit is not declining, it's actually getting further and further away from Earth at the moment. The energy to do this is stolen from the rotational energy of Earth via tidal effects.
The problem with power at the poles is that you might want to explore regions other than the poles. Of course, I suppose you can start at the poles and start manufacturing infrastructure. You would need high tension lines 5,450 kilometers or less long to reach any other point on the moon from where you generate the power. If you can actually get mining and manufacturing going, that's pretty doable. Especially when you consider that due to the lower gravity, relative geological stability, and lack of wind and rain on the moon, the towers carrying the lines could be very flimsy and spaced much further apart than towers on earth. I wonder if anyone has studied the problem of long distance power transmission on the moon. I imagine the major obstacle would be micrometeorite damage to the lines themselves. If they're say two centimeters wide, and 5,450 km long, that's 109000 square meters of surface area. I can't find any actual numbers on frequency of meteorite strikes on the moon, but I'm starting to think transmission lines would need to be buried.
Either way, even if you can get the solar cells and power transmission system up and running from scratch, you have to start with something. Making nuclear reactors on the moon is probably more difficult and requires a larger industrial base than making solar cells, but, to get the energy to start making solar cells in the first place, you have to have brought something to generate power with you, and a nuclear reactor would be able to generate a lot more power than the same mass of solar cells (unless maybe one of those super-thin film, high-efficiency solar cell stories we see all the time actually bears viable fruit someday). So, the logical progression is probably going to be to bring along a nuclear reactor, use its power to make the infrastructure to build solar cells, then use those to power further development of the infrastructure until it's capable of building nuclear reactors.
Technically, it would only need to be 3400 miles long (the extension cord). Ultimately, I imagine a grid of cables circling the moon with vast factories running in the shade of solar panels that cover the surface. We would need self-replicating machinery to set this kind of infrastructure up, which I think will be possible in 50-100 years.
I can't find any actual numbers on frequency of meteorite strikes on the moon, but I'm starting to think transmission lines would need to be buried.
I'm guessing this is probably because no one really knows. To know about anything besides really big meteor strikes on the moon, we'd actually need to have some kind of presence there, instead of just looking at it through telescopes. All we've done so far is send a few 50s-60s probes and then a few manned missions to drive around a little in buggys and play golf (and do a handful of experiments and take some samples), and then we left and never bothered to go back. Heck, our understanding of the moon is so utterly pathetic that even though we had humans set foot there 40 years ago, we only learned a couple years ago that there's water there! If we had been serious about exploring the place all along, we'd have known that simple fact decades ago, and we'd also know a lot more about meteor and micrometeor frequency.
I believe you're probably correct; if power lines aren't buried, they'll be spending too much time running around and repairing them. But burying them should be fairly easy I would think. Here, we have problems burying stuff because there's always something in the way, either a body of water, or someone else's property, buildings, cities, etc. On the moon, there's nothing except regolith and rocks. It shouldn't be that hard to have automated machines digging a 5450km trench.
Why are we in such a rush to go out into space and colonize the moon and mars....really, let's work on ending world famine, and making the world pollution free first, are my thoughts....spending all this money makes it sound, desperate, and if there is desperation to get off this rock, then I guess an asteroid hitting earth is not far along too....
There are also abundant levels of Thorium on the lunar near-side
"Abundance" is, of course, a relative term. Average abundance of thorium in Earth's crust is around 7 ppm; most of it, however, is in much richer deposits, so that a handful of dirt from my backyard is essentially free of thorium. (I hope.)
The abundant levels on the Moon that you quote peak (not average) at around 13 ppm. Not trivial, but we won't be scooping it up in buckets and shoveling it into reactors either. The chemistry to extract and refine it using minerals and elements available on the Moon would have to be developed.
Why is this important:
Exactly because water is scarce on the moon. Some form of purification step is needed to turn pee into drinking water.
Here on Earth most of the water is unusable for non-biological reasons. Salt in sea water. Carbonates in well water. Various contaminants such as heavy metals, H2S.
Water is also a source of oxygen (breathing) and Hydrogen (rocket fuel) and is the easier way to store both. With a large energy source on the moon it will be a lot cheaper to ship liquid (or frozen) water than to ship LOX and LH2
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Whether people live on the moon will depend on the economics. Bad idea to say 'never' to an economic notion. See G. Harry Stine's book "The Third Industrial Revolution" for details.
Consider right now the economics in the oil patch. Compare the cost of a mobile platform deep water rig to the costs of the crew. lf there is a sufficiently valuble product people will go there to produce it.
As an example, consider some of the Near Earth asteroids. What is the value of a cubic kilometer of a nickle iron asteroid moved into above synchronous (> 40,000 km) orbit?
1 cubic km = 10*9 cubic meters. = 5 E12 kg of what amounts to impure stainless steel. At $100 per pound that's worth 500 trillion dollars just because it is mass in orbit. (And right now no one can do $100/pound to orbit.)
Ni-Fe meteors assay out at significant amounts of gold and the platinum group of metals. Something like 0.1% Even a 1 km3 rock has more of these metals than we have ever mined.
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During the age of colonization, colonies died. Not just people. Whole colonies. This was new technology. It was expensive. Compare the cost of sending exploration/colonization ships to the governmental budget.
I don't expect to go there next Tuesday. But after seeing the changes in the last 50 years, I am reluctant to say that it can never happen.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
The problem with burying the lines is, what happens if you want to push the voltage very high, as you need to in order to send power long distances with less cables and without lots of substations. At those voltages, won't the power ground out?
Obviously, you have to put some kind of insulator around the cable, and you need more insulator thickness for higher voltages. We do it cheaply on earth by simply hanging them in the air, even though air is not a perfect insulator (though it is very good). It'd work even better on the Moon since there's no air, as vacuum is the best insulator, but if micrometeors are really a big problem there (I don't know, but it seems like a good possibility; the moon has a fair amount of gravity after all), then using an insulator and burying it may be more economical than dealing with occasional cable faults due to micrometeors.
Hmm, I guess if the vacuum insulates well enough, you might be able to have a relatively thin insulated conduit with the cable suspended in the middle. I can see why the idea of a nice, localized nuclear reactor appeals.
You've got to be kidding. Nuclear power requires an enormous amount of space and complex equipment: heavy shielding for the reactor, steam pipes, a separate set of steam pipes with a heat exchanger between the radioactive steam and the non-radioactive steam, steam turbines, plus a nearby river to dump all the heat into. If you don't dump the heat quickly enough when there's a problem, you get a meltdown, so you can't rely on air cooling with no backup.
On top of all this, there's the whole waste issue: it generates tons of highly radioactive waste, which has to be disposed of somewhere. Technically, you could reprocess it and use it as fuel again, but practically, you can't do that, because, well, terrorists might get it! Face it, reprocessing will never, even happen in the USA.
And finally, the efficiency of nuclear power is really rather poor. Gasoline engines probably have better efficiency than large nuclear plants. Not only because most of the energy in the fuel is wasted because you're throwing it away when it's only 5% used, but because it relies on the carnot thermal cycle.
Maybe someday someone will come up with a clever reactor that generates electricity directly, instead of having to go through the whole thermal process. But don't you think that by the time this happens, someone will have invented a better battery technology? There's only one thing holding us back from electric cars, and that's battery technology. Nothing else. And today's newest batteries (like Lithion Iron Phosphate) are actually pretty good, just not quite good enough to fully replace gasoline or diesel. There's tons of research going on right now to improve battery technology, and all it'll take is a rather minor improvement in efficiency (less than an order of magnitude) to make fossil-fuel cars completely obsolete. Heck, we're already on the verge of having plug-in hybrid-electric cars that can drive 100+ miles without turning on the engine (the best ones now can only go about 50, which is still sufficient for most commuters, though these obviously aren't quite on the market yet).
After that, as a society, we really should be eliminating cars altogether for most purposes, and this can easily be done with Personal Rapid Transit systems like SkyTran. The basic technology already exists, and would be pretty simple to develop into a working system, if only it had enough funding, and the deployment cost is 5-10x cheaper than light rail, and similar to the cost of building regular roads (and probably cheaper than the astronomical cost of highways). People don't need cars in urban areas; they're a hindrance, and a giant cause of deaths and injuries. While PRT will probably never replace cars in rural areas, or for things like heavy cargo, it would eliminate the need for 80-90% of the population to own a car, and all the costs (both personal and societal) that go along with that.
The problem is that any nuclear-based power source needs some kind of cooling apparatus, or else it simply won't work. We don't yet know of a way to convert nuclear fission into electricity directly, so we have to use a thermal cycle to do it. This relies on being able to exhaust heat into the environment somehow. On earth, we do it with cooling towers and rivers. On the moon, there's no atmosphere and certainly no large bodies of liquid water, so you have to rely on radiative heat transfer, which is horribly ineffective and means you'll need some kind of giant panels to radiate this heat away. There's absolutely no way a suitcase-size nuclear device can generate power on the moon, without having some way of radiating the heat away, presumably through some type of panels that unfold from it.
If you're going to build something with giant panels, why not just send solar panels up there?
Sorry, no. There are 3 types of heat transfer: radiation (infrared), mass transfer, and physical contact.
The normal terms are radiation, convection, and conduction. Convection requires a moving liquid or gaseous medium to transfer heat, and conduction only requires physical contact.
In space mass transfer and physical contact are out of the question but radiation works quite well.
Nope. It works, but I wouldn't call it "quite well", because radiation is by far the least effective of the three types of heat transfer. To generate a serious amount of power, you'll need some kind of giant cooling apparatus to radiate the heat away. There's no way a suitcase-size reactor can generate any power on the Moon, without some kind of huge radiative panels attached to it which are much, much larger than the suitcase.