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Rover Fuel Came From Russian Nuke Factory, But Supplies Running Low
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...
Good. Nice to see plutonium used for more worthwhile endeavours than nuclear weapons.
As part of the pseudo-environmentalist lead scare campaign against nuclear power you always hear about things that will supposedly be radioactive for ONE MILLION years (thank you Dr. Evil).
Well, those ONE MILLION year radioactive elements won't power an RTG because they decay so slowly that the rate of heat production would hardly be measurable even with sensitive test equipment. You could use a lump of that stuff as a paper weight and as long as you didn't eat/drink/breath it then you would never have any negative health effects from it.
The real issue with radioactive material is from materials like cesium and strontium that are pretty radioactive and have mid-range half-lives of ~30 years or so. Not a real issue for long-term storage since they will be pretty much gone in 1000 years, but not something you want spread around the environment ala Chernobyl, which, BTW, is coming up on its first half-life anniversary for the nastier elements.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
RORSAT: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_954
Although it was a Uranium reactor and not plutonium.
Moral of the story: The radioactivity caused mutant Canadians to have one hockey-stick shaped arm and another arm perfectly shaped to hold a beer. It was considered the greatest even in Canadian history.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Homer: [reading screen] "To Start Press Any Key". Where's the ANY key?
I see Esk ["ESC"], Catarl ["CTRL"], and Pig-Up ["PGUP"]. There
doesn't seem to be any ANY key. Woo! All this computer hacking
is making me thirsty. I think I'll order a TAB. [presses TAB
key] Awp...no time for that now, the computer's starting.
[reading screen slowly] "Check core temperature, yes slash no."
[types] Yes.
"Core temperature normal." Hmph. Not too shabby.
"Vent radioactive gas." [types] NO.
"Venting prevents explosi-on." Heeheee...whoa, this is hard.
Where's my Tab? Okay, then, [types] YES, vent the stupid gas.
[Cut to a farmer tending his corn. The gas release blows away
part of the crop.]
Farmer: Oh, no! The corn. Paul Newman's gonna have my legs broke.
Yes, there is a waste stream from reprocessing.
However, it is informative to look at how and when the mess that is - among others - Hanford, came to be.
At the time, the Military was building bombs to kill a million people at a shot, and the prevailing attitude was that the Soviet Union was only a month away from launching bombers and submarines and missiles, to kill US citizens by the tens or hundreds of millions. The Russians thought the same thing of the US; I think it perplexed them terribly that we didn't attack. After all, their sworn ally, Adolf Hitler, just changed his mind one day and launched a full scale invasion. So the Russians (and Ukranians, and others) were building bombs to kill people in the US by the tens or hundreds of millions.
Along with all this paranoia, came a driving requirement to build more and bigger weapons. There was a bomber gap, then a missile gap, and if you watched Dr. Strangelove, a mine shaft gap. No one in the bomb business was worrying about poisoning a few hundred workers, or a few thousand coyotes or fish or prairie dogs. They were building bombs, and it was enough that the waste from their efforts not end up with dead workers before they managed to actually build their bombs.
They temporized, they were careless (careless enough to skewer a reactor operator to a concrete slab with a control rod), but most of all, they were in a tearing hurry. They had to build those bombs before the Rooskies (or the Amerikans) attacked.
It's no wonder they did a crap job.
One would sincerely hope that today, we are a little more rational. We can reprocess fuel - we know the basic processes - and we can do so without making a radioactive dead spot on the prairie, or creating glow-in-the-dark salmon. It's kind of like building airplanes. Mistakes happen, people die. But every time something bad happens, we send in very smart engineers and figure out what happened, and why, and design new and better processes so that the next time, fewer people die.
Chernobyl happened for exactly the same reasons. The Soviets essentially copied the very first Fermi pile (the one under the squash stadium), added cooling and steam pipes, and scaled it up by a factor of a few thousand. This was poor engineering, but it was quick, and they had to get their reactors online quickly so that they could make the materials to make the bombs that they needed to defend themselves. All delusion (well, mostly delusion) but they had a good reason, as did we. The end result was a whopping big accident, but pay close attention here, there was no nuclear explosion.
We can reprocess fuel rods - which to me, sounds a whole lot better than leaving thousands of tons of insanely radioactive stuff cooling its heels in ponds all over the world. By reprocessing the fuel, we can make new fuel, we can take that crazy hot stuff and concentrate it into kilograms instead of tonnes, and incidentally, make it radioactive enough that no terrorist could stay alive long enough to steal it. We can separate needed isotopes for space exporation and cancer treatment and food sterilization.
And what do we have to give up to do this? We have to give up irrational fear. There are lots of things to fear - read Feynman's talk about building Y-12 - but the things to fear are real things, not crazy paranoid fantasies. The Fukushima disaster may have achieved criticality of stored used fuel rods, but there was no nuclear explosion. People died, from the tidal wave. Some people were exposed to low levels of radiation, but as was pointed out earlier in this venue, less exposure than they would have had than had they simply lived in Denver, USA for a year.
We can do this. We have the technology, we have the scientists, we have the engineers. Like any new thing, there will be mistakes, and perhaps those mistakes will cost lives. The comparison isn't to "will bad things happen if we do this" -- the proper comparison is "what bad things will happen if we don't do this."
-- Norm Reitzel
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
[referring to the Curiosity rover]
Reuters [looks through a camcorder] This is heavy-duty, Doc. This is great. Uh, does it run, like, on regular unleaded gasoline?
NASA Scientist: Unfortunately, no. It requires something with a little more kick. Plutonium.
Reuters: Um, plutonium. Wait a minute. Are...
[lowers the camcorder]
Reuters: Are you telling me that this sucker is nuclear?
NASA Scientist: Hey, hey, hey! Keep rolling. Keep rolling there.
[The reporter raises the camcorder]
NASA Scientist: No, no, no, no, no, this sucker's electrical, but I need a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity I need.
Reuters: Doc, you don't just walk into a store and-and buy plutonium. Did you rip that off?
NASA Scientist: Of course. From a group of Soviet nationalists. They wanted me to build them a bomb, so I took their plutonium and, in turn, gave them a shoddy bomb casing full of used pinball machine parts. Come on! Let's get you a radiation suit. We must prepare to reload.
Let's face it, most of us are scoffers. But moments before zero hour, it does not pay to take chances.
Idaho National Laboratory actually commented on the Slate piece, saying:
It was disappointing to read Mr. Brumfiel's article. The Curiosity mission represents everything that is great about American ingenuity and engineering. For months, we've hosted a public website that explains via a virtual tour and factsheets how the nuclear battery was developed, fueled, tested and delivered. The website is available at http://www.inl.gov/marsrover.
No, no... It's because we've now given the Martians what they need to make PU-238 space modulators.
One useful byproduct of the liquid fluoride thorium reactor is PU238
As you mentioned, that was Uranium, not Plutonium. It was also a reactor and not an RTG, which means that it's much harder to lock the fuel up in a safe, shielded container. RTGs use pellets of radioactive material inside a casing that will almost always survive a disastrous re-entry intact. Add to that the fact that Plutonium 238 is very safe relative to Uranium 235. There's no gamma radiation or neutrons and it can be effectively shielded with very thin shielding. The biggest danger it presents is probably that the capsule containing the Plutonium will hit someone on re-entry.
Already, three major cities in Japan have been turned into an uninhabitable
nuclear wasteland, where no life can exist for millions of years, and you want to continue this trend? Already, Europeans have done the right thing and are starting to go along in banning radiation and nuclear. Germany is closing all its existing reactors. Do you want to be worse than Germany?