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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...
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...
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
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.
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.
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
... nuclear devices flying around for months over enemy territory ...
What could possibly go wrong?
Check your premises.
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?
I don't believe the decision-makers are concerned about that. They have great security and lots of bunkers they can hide out in to maintain "continuity of government" etc.
For them, that risk is probably viewed as political capital (because it's all just a game and winning is all that counts). That's how sociopaths think. The whole 9/11 thing is wearing thin. Imagine how many pointless foreign wars of aggression you could justify if some enemy with an unpronouncable name who dresses funny had NUCLEAR SECRETS! You'd really be super-ultra unpatriotic to oppose THAT one.
If you're a private military contractor with lots of clout in Washington, then even the worst-case scenario is a goldmine. After all, it's not like it will be you personally or your own sons who go off to some foreign shithole to get shot at by the locals.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
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"?
I wouldn't worry so much about the secrets, but rather the nuclear materials you provide them free of charge for anyone who manages to shoot (or lure) one down.
And the summary completely misses the main point of the story:
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.
“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.”
Apparently the submitter, in typical Anonymous Coward fashion, failed to read past the first paragraph.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The proposal is for a drone with an RTG power source, not a nuclear reactor. The technology is simple and only limited by safety concerns and the generally limited availability of suitable radioisotopes.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
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!
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.
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.