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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."
This is the most beautiful poetry I have ever seen. Oh my God.
You must be a Vogon.
It seems like you're confusing Pu-239, which is used in weapons and has a half-life of 24000 years, with Pu-238, which is not used in weapons and has a half-life of around 90 years.
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.
My father was is the first lot of troops into Nagasaki and he stayed there for as part of the Japanese Occupation Force. They were given no warnings about radiation, no protective equipment, and allowed to pick and pry wherever they wanted among the ruins. HIs photos were taken from pretty much every part of the city.
He had no health problems that could be attributed to radiation. Those of his friends and shipmates who were there also were the same. In every case when they suffered serious ill health it was due to smoking or drinking.
What I have noticed though is curious congenital conditions occasionally popping up in their children, about 1 child in 4 or 5, when there was no history of it previously. This may or may not be coincidence but while these conditions may be awkward for those that have them, no-one has died from one yet.
I myself have worked with radioactive materiels and while they creep the bejesus out of anyone who has anything to do with them the radiation is not overly dangerous at low levels except over long periods, say taking x-rays every day. Even spending six months in Nagasaki starting two weeks after they dropped a plutonium bomb on it didn't cause any problems among the people I know who did it.
I said - don't look Ethel!..., but it was too late..., she'd already looked.
It's a HaiKKKu
Table-ized A.I.