New Small Fission Reactor For Deep-space Missions Demonstrated

cylonlover writes "Exploring the regions of deep space beyond Mars means sending probes where solar power isn't practical. Since the 1960s, NASA has equipped its Apollo missions and unmanned explorers with Radioisotope Thermal Generators (RTGs). These have worked very well, but they run on plutonium 238, which is currently in short supply. Therefore, the Los Alamos National Laboratory is developing a new small nuclear reactor for spacecraft that uses uranium instead of plutonium to power Stirling engines and generate electricity. At the Nevada National Security Site's Device Assembly Facility near Las Vegas, engineers from Los Alamos, the NASA Glenn Research Center and National Security Technologies LLC conducted a Demonstration Using Flattop Fissions (DUFF) experiment that produced 24 watts of electricity using a pair of free-piston Stirling engines."

Comments

Re:What could possibly go wrong

[Whatsisname]

It's wouldn't be objectively any nastier than the other toxic substances such as hydrazine that would be sprayed all over the place in an explosion. "Dirty bombs" are not something to be taken seriously. Blowing up an equal mass of mercury would be more dangerous than the uranium, and the damage uranium would pose is more that it is a heavy metal than due to it being radioactive.