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Coming To a War Near You: Nuclear Powered Drones
An anonymous reader writes "American scientists and engineers are researching a new generation of UAV's that would be nuclear-powered. Why do this? They would have the capacity to stay over a target area for months and only be limited by the ordinance they could drop on a potential foe. They would be similar to a nuclear attack submarine but not limited to the amount of food on-board. The article notes: 'The blueprints for the new drones, which have been developed by Sandia National Laboratories – the U.S. government's principal nuclear research and development agency – and defense contractor Northrop Grumman, were designed to increase flying time "from days to months" while making more power available for operating equipment, according to a project summary published by Sandia,' the paper reported."
Welcome our nuclear powered flying overlords.
I suppose this would provide some disincentive for shooting them down too:
Should I shoot it down and stop myself from getting attacked with an air-to-ground missile, or should I not shoot it down and stop myself from getting a lungful of plutonium dust. Hmmm... choices, choices...
So when these inevitably are downed for some reason (e.g. technical malfunctions, enemy interference, etc), what's to stop the enemy from reverse engineering the technology and gaining "nuclear secrets"?
In all other cases where we implement nuclear technology, there's not a huge risk of it falling into enemy hands. So how will they address these concerns for a drone?
You should be happy! Sounds like something from Fallout, maybe we'll get to play it in real life!
The US military already has a pretty bad record when it comes to the environment (http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/2-us-department-of-defense-is-the-worst-polluter-on-the-planet/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/29/AR2008062901977.html). What happens when one of these is shot down, or malfunctions? What if it does so over a populated area? What impact could it have on the groundwater, etc...
That's what you get with the huge government empire, and when I point out that I would like more freedoms instead in order to be able to get myself a nuclear powered car - this place throws a hissy fit.
You can't handle the truth.
Uhhh, you do realize that slashdot is group moderated by users with excellent karma, right?
And unsurprisingly the Slashdot headline fails to note that the program work has been halted and that it was never approved. Doing a little feasibility research is entirely reasonable for the military. That is, assuming they don't waste too much money on something that has serious downsides -- yeah I know, leap of faith time.
Crazy ideas turn out to be reasonable once in a great while -- we call they breakthroughs.
i was moderating with positive karma. and it's funny (both ha ha and strange) how much trolling you can get away with and maintain it.
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
satellites? high altitude ballons? solar powered uavs? sounds like a way to spend many billions which could be better used to just bribe any enemies... or build a stronger economy, a much better defense!
It seems like UUVs (Unmanned Underwater Vehicles) would be the logical alternative. Terminal velocity of falling/sinking objects is lower in water than in air, which means lower impact forces and potential for rupturing a reactor, not to mention the significantly lower human population density on the ocean floor than on land. Also, they'd be harder to find and to sink than their aerial counterparts.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
A couple of times in the article the talk about these drones crashing or falling into enemy hands. What they can't bring themselves to say (or perhaps even think about) is that because they will be used for warfare (that is what flying above enemy territory is all about) that they might be shot down. Since it is air borne they are going to want to keep the weight down, this means minimal nuclear containment -- so when it is shot down there will be radio nucleotides all over the place!
Is it a case of hands over eyes and pretend hard, or that since it will be over non USA territory it doesn't matter ?
Either way: I am glad that they are not making these things.
Awww, did da widdle trolly-wolly get his bum-bum spanked?
Come back when you're potty-trained, threadshitter.
They would ... only be limited by the ordinance they could drop on a potential foe.
Not surprising that it's the United States which comes up with a device to literally drop their laws on unsuspecting nations.
Oh wait, slashdot, you must have meant ordnance.
My friend told me that uh, they are going to use these guys to deliver tacos or something soon, right?
I have that "Odd Uncle" that swears the crash at Area 51 many years ago was an atomic aircraft in development, and the pilots were wearing anti-radiation suits.
Trolling is what makes slashdot a worthwhile site. But good trolling isn't just saying offensive or outrageous things to provoke an angry response. That's lame. Good trolling is writing something that seems serious, and yet at the same time somehow flawed. Then, given the nature of the kind of people who read slashdot, you get a bunch of responses from people who want to show their intellectual superiority by pointing out the factual errors, or the ridiculousness of the argument, or whatever the flaw was. You can keep it going for a while by making ignorant counter responses. Eventually the trollees figure out they're being trolled and get disgusted. Everyone else who was just reading along finds it all hilarious and enjoyable.
Only they didn't ask.
The original drones were meant as cheap somewhat disposable aircraft that avoided loss of life and aircraft that cost 35 to 400 million to replace. Now since contractors are making a bundle off building them they ask how can we make them more expensive? The first version of the modern drones were built by a modelmaker in the US for Israel and they were essentially large RC planes with on board cameras. They cost around 50K to build. The US was so impressed they launched their own drone program which for many years was a miserable failure. At first they were shooting for 500K instead of the modest 50K. Eventually the price shot up to 1.5 to 3 million. I have no idea what the current ones cost. It's classic military in that now that you have one that can fly recon can you arm it? Now can you make it stay up for 24 hours? What about days, weeks, months? Every time they open their mouths to try to turn them into swiss army knives that can do anything the price goes up. One day you'll hear about 400 million dollar drones and the cost savings will be out the window. Why do you need one that can stay up for months at a time at potentially 10X the cost? Isn't it better to have ten drones that need to be refueled more often? One gets shot down or a mechanical failure and you still have nine. You can cover more ground with ten drones and each can be specialized rather than trying to make them so them can do anything needed. The real beauty of a drone is a cheap craft that can be mass produced and it doesn't hurt so much when they get shot down. They already made them stealth which is expensive and now they want nuclear. It's just more and bigger toys with only a marginal advantage.
Uhhh, you do realize that slashdot is group moderated by users with excellent karma, right?
Uhh, you do realize that reading comprehension is a good thing, right?
Hint: he talked about being BANNED. If you don't know what that means, you had an opportunity to ask. Instead you make something up that is not what he was talking about because it's more familiar to you. You must be American. For bonus points, you're probably obese too.
Hint 2: BANNED means you try to make a post and you get a message telling you that your IP address/subnet is not allowed to post anonymously and that logged in posts may be banned too. How you could confuse that with moderation is a miracle of reading comprehension FAIL.
The United States started work in this field back in the 60s, trying to build cruise missiles that would be able to fly around continuously.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto
This has been done already, check out the (slightly environmentally unfriendly) Project Pluto.
Ok, we already have detractors and we have no idea yet how the power-plant works. However, there is a strong likelihood that nuclear drones won't be as dangerous as it sounds.
The drones are going to be weight dependent. It will not make sense for enriched uranium dioxide pellets will be used as they are in nuclear reactors. These will simply weigh too much. Instead, metallic uranium will surely be used providing a much higher energy density and will weigh considerably less. If the drone were to crash, a solid chunk of metallic uranium is not likely to fragment into many small pieces as the uranium dioxide pellets would and would likely remain in one or a few large pieces.
Nuclear material is far easier to clean up than chemical spills are. All it takes is a Geiger counter to locate all the pieces of the nuclear core and any contaminated soil. A solid uranium core such as would more than likely be used would be even easier to clean up. Finally, if you have a nuclear drone flying over your head, you may want to think twice before shooting it down.
Giant razor-clawed bioengineered crabs.
You want to know how to help your kids? LEAVE THEM THE F*&K ALONE. --George Carlin
... nuclear devices flying around for months over enemy territory ...
What could possibly go wrong?
Check your premises.
It seems that if this platform is coupled with a laser weapon there would be effectively no limit to the amount of destruction that could be rained down on one's enemies while this drone is airborne.
Imagine a high-flying drone that circles over an area for months at a time, sniping strategic targets with a laser at will.
Now imagine a whole fleet of them.
I'm not an actor, but I play one on TV...
What lead a reactor company named General Atomics to start making aircraft. Now its a bit more clear.
Well played GA, well played.
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
Blow it up in the air.
I think people seriously need to get over this nuclear phobia they have about this. Nuclear power is safe, cost effective, and it miniaturizes well. I'll buy that nuclear car the first day they let me damnit. But nuclear flying machines is okay for now.
Nuclear submarines have a crew that maintains the reactor. Unmanned reactors are not a good idea.
Just to get the small amount of material on board.
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
If anyone had bothered to read the article, you'd know they aren't doing this. From TFA:
The fact that the program has been halted is something that Peter Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and an expert on drone warfare, suggests may be lost in the attention on the nuclear aspect of the project.
case in point - this slashdot story and every comment posted here about it.
Also FTFA:
“What people seem to be missing is that the program was not approved. We are not building it!” he told me. “All sorts of ideas are proposed by scientists, and this one was found to involve a technology not yet ready for prime time and which carries some deep concerns about its implications for operations, legal concerns, and fear of accident impact. So it was not approved.”
Did the submitter or editor even bother to read the story before making the headline?
shot down another drown to power it with
It'll probably be encased in MP35N. Not that that makes it less valuable as dirty bomb fodder.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Didn't we just see a demonstration of a solar-powered airborne cell tower that loitered for something like 2 weeks? Hope I got the stats right, too lazy to verify my memory.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Go read the story and you will find out how much money we will throw down a rat hole.
ZERO. Program was not halted.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Nuclear reactors aren't exactly lightweight... and one of the chief goals in running an efficient air vehicle is to minimize its mass.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I thought that nuclear powered airships were declared illegal by the UN or something. Space, yes, but not air..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
US has successfully flown a plane with an operating nuclear reactor onboard (though they didn't get so far as to actually use it to power the engines... which, on the other hand, means that it was heavier than the real thing would have been). Soviets also had a similar project, though they've skimped on radiation shielding and it didn't go all that well as a consequence.
So, yes, you can get it off the ground. And the thing is, once you can, "too heavy" doesn't really matter if you have a power source that can keep all that heaviness up. Now they just need to stick a laser onto that thing so that it doesn't need ammunition, and then it can truly stay up in the air 24/7 for months.
Like the 'war on terror' so they can fly around and watch our back yards for months on end?
Besides, don't we have satellites that can do a better job at this point anyway?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Make the admins ponies and watch viewership soar.
Now all we need is an army of nuclear drones flying over our heads.
none
A better approach is to increase the reliability of the parts, but this means spending serious money and development time. It will always be cheaper to purchase a few more platforms and let them take turns in their observation duty.
No wonder that thing will not be put into service soon. It is not going to happen. The whole thing has probably only been studied to siphon off more money from clueless military administrators.
You know it's time for the next revolution when your rulers' names end with roman numerals.
Lasers! Lasers! Lasers!
A nuclear drone really should have laser cannons.
Pew! Pew! Pew!
(Sorry, couldn't resist)
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana." --Groucho Marx
Should I shoot it down and stop myself from getting attacked with an air-to-ground missile, or should I not shoot it down and stop myself from getting a lungful of plutonium dust.
Having a nuclear powered drone circling over the head of some mad dictator who does not care for his international reputation nor for his people does not seem like a good idea and, if they do decide to do it, I really hope that they do not use some weapon grade material like plutonium!
Employees also have unlimited mod points, which they abuse frequently.. community be damned. You gotta remember, Slashdot is a corporate site now. They are catering to wider audience to widen their advertising grip.
Well... by too heavy, I mean that you end up having to use a higher power/mass ratio.
Obviously, with more lift you can lift anything, regardless of its mass. It's just that at some point, it's going to get so heavy that it's simply not worth the bother. I would have thought that, generally speaking, using a nuclear reactor as power for a drone would be crossing that line.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Wow, I'm glad you thought of that disaster! You should totally work for Sandia NL, I mean with brilliant insights I'm _sure_ they didn't think of, you would be a great fucking asset.
Seriously, what kind of facile bullshit are you babbling about? As if they wouldn't include such occurrences in their planning?
Well fuck, Darryl, turns out we should have thought about the plane crashing as the massive amounts of radioactive materials we put on that drone just killed 50k people!
So, yes, you can get it off the ground. And the thing is, once you can, "too heavy" doesn't really matter if you have a power source that can keep all that heaviness up.
Good point but perhaps too subtle. The thing wouldn't need to take off on its own, just stay aloft once it's up there. Boosters or a heavy lift aircraft are easy.
Lasers or a rail gun are interesting possibilities for weapons. Bottom line though is that this just isn't needed as long as you have a runway a few hundred miles away. More likely we'll see solar powered ultralight sensors that can stay up for a few days and longer range weapons that can be used as desired. Pretty scary to be on the receiving end of that technology.
Seems to me the very best way to avoid doing that is to restrict the military to securing one's own border (and only one's own border) against unprovoked foreign attacks. Then you could also reduce expenditures until we're only 2-3 times more powerful than the second strongest military.
That's also why I would never make it in politics.
Agreed in concept. Today US aircraft fly the world's most advanced air weapons systems against no threat, so it's easy to argue US military power exceeds the needs of the nation. But that factor of 2-3 times is where the question comes in for everyone. The rapid and unexpected growth of the German war machine in the 1940s makes a very strong historical example to support the argument that 2-3 times is not sufficient. The boundary conditions of what worst case scenario to base the analysis on and what contribution from allies to assume makes for solid arguments that would support a very wide range of numbers.
The other side of the story is that the US military's R&D spurs and creates technological innovation in private industry, which adds to global wealth. Military R&D goals are different from market or academic goals, so it often will ask and fund very different research questions from academic and market channels. The research is done by firms that fully intend to make profit-producing products out of the research results, so a small percentage of the technology trickles down into major advances in commercial goods.
It's not the best way to do it, but this is very politically safe funding for basic research. It produces real fruits too. GPS is one, and the most important is probably ARPANET, a legitimate parent of the internet. I would hazard a guess that the work and funding from DARPA accelerated the development of the modern internet by ~10 years. Earlier development of the internet had huge positive implications on the genuine wealth of our world--not just the wealth of the US, and it came directly from military spending.
If the general category "military spending" were cut and we wanted those external benefits to not die with it, the US would need to simultaneously fund politically vulnerable organizations such as NASA and the National Labs to offset for the losses in research. They are very technically effective, but NASA's money could go on the political chopping block at any election cycle and not recover for decades--just where it is now--whereas defense funded research is politically secure.
(Note: all figures below reflect electrical or mechanical power, not thermal power, and weights include thermoelectrics or heat engines, not bare reactors.)
Currently deployed RTGs have shitty Power/Weight Ratio, in the range 1-10 W/kg for the RTG alone, and these are already designed for spacecraft where weight is crucial. Compare to the Wright Flyer, which had a whole-vehicle P/W of about 30 W/kg (engine: 116 W/kg), or a Predator UAV (again, whole-vehicle) @ 85 W/kg, and you'll see that's not even close.
Comparing small fission reactors, the S6G reactor used in Los Angeles-class submarines makes 17 W/kg, and could conceivably be improved if designed for uncrewed situations and greater emphasis on low weight. A space-based reactor design from the '80s that was sadly canceled, the SP-100 was to make about 35 W/kg -- not perfect, but approaching feasibility, and 5 times better than the ASRG (AFAIK the most power-dense radioisotope plant on the drawing board today, using an efficient Stirling engine rather than thermoelectric junctions).
For future next-generation designs, see the Hyperion uranium hydride reactor, which is supposed to make 1500 W/kg, more-or-less, as a land-based design. Doesn't mean all that much till we see a prototype, but Pu-based RTGs simply can't come anywhere remotely close. Now maybe isotopes of some light metal could put RTGs back in the game -- and you certainly can't fission light elements for a corresponding gain! -- but for now, fission reactors have the lead.
You do realize that radioisotopic generators the size of a small fridge are used to power spacecraft all the time. And the Japanese have designs for fully self contained nuclear power plants the size of a bus.
For someone who has done their homework on them, are RTGs practical in any way for the amounts of power needed for flight? Assuming you've got the admittedly heavy substances, is it particularly bulky to make the generators or could they be scaled into something like this? (And obviously overlooking the fact that if one crashes you've got highly radioactive contaminants being scattered)
what about nuclear powered sub-marine drones. That would be bruce-lee like awesome... ./ has always had a problem with juicing 'toys that kill', too many tech people lack the savvy to see how offensive it is. More recently, ./'s problem has become more like an obsession or addiction. The military has nothing to teach us; never has, never will.
Does it run on a Turing machine?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
My father worked on this in the 1960's. There was no real problem getting a plane to fly. The shielding for a realistic crew was a problem though. Drones don't have a crew so spot shielding for equipment might do the job. A flock of these might have a realistic chance at doing launch phase anti-ICBM work which might change strategic nuclear postures substantially. Pretty serious implications.
Oh bullshit. Windshear is a problem on approach, when you're near the ground and flying not far from stall speed. For an aircraft at altitude it's just a wild ride.
This information is tremendously interesting for non-US countries because it shows the US are going to split their development effort between distinct technologies for military (nuclear) and civilian applications, which will be a catastrophy for them and a boon for the others.
I don't explain you why nobody will want to invest into a civilian "your Wifi in the sky" system that's just radioactive.
I may need to explain why it is so difficult for eternal flight not to go nuclear.
There has been a huge lot of US developments, with the most advanced, lightest materials and equipments, like NASA/Aerovironment HELIOS devices: just by seeing their progressive increase in wingspan "as nothing else available" it comes quickly to mind that they reached their asymptotic capacity before turning entierely autonomous, I mean: eternal flight.
(for details check for instance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Pathfinder )
A quick word on lighter-than-air: just because high-altitude winds are typically in the range of hundred mph, a lighter-than-air balloon will never harvest enough sun energy to maintain itself against the wind. Really, this would require an awful lot of power: the balloon is large, you know.
In a word: no eternal flight available from vehicles that are just solar-powered, the military think. Thus, let's go nuclear with small Radioisotopic Thermal Generators, the same techno perfectly qualified ages ago since the Voyager mission.
And civilian applications, well, they'll wait, OK?
Nothing technical in the above is wrong. The flaw is, they are just missing another source of energy: jet streams. ;-)
The 100mph winds I mentioned earlier can bring an enormous amount of energy to devices that would bracket them, e. g. by sitting one aircraft within the stream and another one 2 km below.
While the mass and drag of the linking is important, simple budgeting, there, shows it works.
Many patents were applied around this idea, more or less efficiently; knowing most here don't like patenting I voluntarily propose an old one, WO2007/107018, and leave you searching more recent, which contain one from myself in a previous company
Still, developing jet-stream-powered drones won't be easy: in general the detailed analyses have been performed, either by single individuals (with no financial nor real technical resources), or by industries that would be severely harmed by such a development: as a defensive reaction (I work in the space industry: eternal-flight drones would kill half of our satellite market!)
So, currently no large industry is really willing / capable to start it up.
This is where "going nuclear" is bad for the US: by separating military investments from civilian potential ones, they'll just halt non-nuclear developments. At least in the US.
Herve S.
Not a new idea, the flying crowbar was just that. It could deliver its load and then fly around for months polluting the enemy territory with nuclear fallout.
http://www.merkle.com/pluto/pluto.html
... here it comes...
What happens when the war is just over and drones continue operating? If they're controlled remotely, as they surely are, their "network" and remote systems could have been completely destroyed. This creates a war with a "long tail", much different than in those movies where people get to know about the end of war, catch the first train and go back home.
Check out my cross-platform apps
This reminds me of Project Pluto, a 1955 attempt to design a nuclear-powered autonomous ramjet capable of loitering for months and then nuking sixteen separate cities. It's just about the coolest example of '50s-era engineering hubris ever. They got as far as building and testing a couple of nuclear engines before pulling the plug.
There was a great article about the project in Air and Space Magazine. From the article:
"Even before it began dropping bombs on our enemies Pluto would have deafened, flattened, and irradiated our friends. (The noise level on the ground as Pluto went by overhead was expected to be about 150 decibels; by comparison, the Saturn V rocket, which sent astronauts to the moon, produced 200 decibels at full thrust.) Ruptured eardrums, of course, would have been the least of your problems if you were unlucky enough to be underneath the unshielded reactor when it went by, literally roasting chickens in the barnyard."
There were serious concerns that if the thing got off its leash, it would just wander the planet for months, raining radioactive waste on everything.
Welcome Back from the DEAD Project PLUTO, except with out the nuclear powered ram jet, yeah google it I dare ya.
How are they converting nuclear radiation directly to electric power? Thermocouples?
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky