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Rover Fuel Came From Russian Nuke Factory, But Supplies Running Low

Posted by Unknown on from the bombs-into-probes dept.

gbrumfiel writes "The Curiosity rover will soon start rolling, and when it does, it will be running on gas from a Russian weapons plant. Slate has the story of how the plutonium-238 that powers the rover came from Mayak, a Soviet-era bomb factory. Mayak made the fuel through reprocessing, a chemical process used to make nuclear warheads that also polluted the surrounding environment. After the cold war ended, the Russians sold the spare Pu-238 to NASA, which put some of it into Curiosity. Now, the Russian supply is running low and NASA hopes to restart Pu-238 production on U.S. soil (They're planning on making less of a mess this time)." One interesting way of dealing with nuclear waste: reprocess fuel a few times, extracting Pu-238 and friends (those pesky "have to keep waste sealed forever to prevent hyper-squirrels in the year 3,001,000 from being irradiated" elements) and launching an army of deep space probes. But then there's the waste stream from reprocessing...

5 of 139 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Good. Nice to see plutonium used for more worthwhile endeavours than nuclear weapons.

    In other news, /. anti-nuke nuts discover MOX fuel and that reactors like CANDU can use it as a fuel source.

  2. LFTR is the way to go by greg_barton · · Score: 4, Interesting

    One useful byproduct of the liquid fluoride thorium reactor is PU238

    1. Re:LFTR is the way to go by Creepy · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I was reading about that yesterday, as well as the fact that mining thorium would yield a supply of heavy rare earth elements that could make the US a major exporter of these, bypassing the massive Chinese tariffs on export put in place specifically to get companies to move their manufacturing to China.

      It just baffles me why the US government doesn't put money into researching LFTR because honestly, it is just win-win-win-win, but then I remember the 600 billion in lobbying the nuclear industry does pretty much specifically to shut out competition. Proliferation concerns are a joke - thorium is a minor alpha emitter in its raw state, which would be the state it is used in for a LFTR, and really, the US doesn't have the capability to even enrich the waste into a bomb, much less a terrorist. Dirty bombs with this stuff is even more of a waste of time - potassium (the stuff you have to ingest to live) is more radioactive.

  3. Re:Good by onyxruby · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Considering nuclear weapons gave us MAD which gave us a period of relative calm that didn't involve something called WW3 I'm inclined to call your comment hyperbole.

  4. Fly in Ointment by ThatsNotPudding · · Score: 3, Interesting

    We can do this. We have the technology, we have the scientists, we have the engineers.

    We also have the corporations, dedicated to cutting every corner for a golden parachute reward - along with bought and paid for politicians that have their back when (not if) something goes wrong due to their craven desires (see: Wall Street banks).