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."
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.
A more accurate link would have been this.
I'm not arguing for complete negligence, but rather that this is an engineering issue that can be solved.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
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.
That DOES sound easier than sending suitcase sized devices to places where we actually need power.
Lets start refering to The War Against Terror by it's initials. . .
Very little. Uranium is actually natural. They will not "turn on" the reactor until it is far from earth. You can stand next to uranium all day long and it will not hurt you. The main problem is when it decays it produced Radon gas "again this is natural" which can cause lung cancer. So this as actually safer than an RTG and really very safe. The thing is that people will yell in fear first and then ignore research. BTW.
I do not work for NASA or any Aerospace firm and the launch pad is pretty near my home so it is sort of in my back yard so I have ZERO interest in down playing any danger.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.