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Philae's Lost Seven Months Were Completely Unnecessary
StartsWithABang writes: This past weekend, the Philae lander reawakened after seven dormant months, the best outcome that mission scientists could've hoped for with the way the mission unfolded. But the first probe to softly land on a comet ever would never have needed to hibernate at all if we had simply built it with the nuclear power capabilities it should've had. The seven months of lost data were completely unnecessary, and resulted solely from the world's nuclear fears.
With nuclear arms?
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Did they equip it with wind turbines?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_space
People will stop fearing nuclear power when world leader stop making irresponsible remarks about nuking people when they are upset. Until then, anything with a rocket stage and a nuclear device in the payload will be taboo.
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When you want unfounded pseudo-scientific shit posted to your website, look no further, ladies and gents. Clueless about technical details, uninformed on regulations, and without any scientific rigor, StartsWithABang has the posting balls to make even Bennett blush. A man who knows better than the experts in EVERY field, can armchair guide every research project without looking into what's going on, and can purely reckon his was to new findings that take mere normal scientists years to fully investigate, SWAB is the unthinking man's thinker.
I'm StartsWithABang, and I approve this and any other message that gets my medium.com blog noticed!
I thought one of the projects goals was to do things within a budget especially considering how many nations in the EU were involved in building it. You'd probably only see a single nation sourced spacecraft with this kind of capability.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Another annoying trend is sites that "drop down" their entire menu system -blotting out half a screen's worth of the article -- if you have javascript turned off.
and resulted solely from the world's nuclear fears.
What bollocks is that? What has an RTG in space to do with a nuclear (fission) reactor on earth?
No one cares how you power your satellites, space probes.
I for my part have no back yard on a comet light minutes away.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Firstly, what caused the problem was not "Nuclear fear", but failure of the harpoon to hold Philea down. The solar panels would have worked fine otherwise.
Secoundly, Plutonium-238 is simply no longer available - nobody makes it anymore. The reason why is because it is created using a dangerous and expensive process by irradiation of neptunium-237.
If we members of the nuclear club start creating more plutonium for "scientific" purposes, then other nations will argue they should be allowed to make it for "scientific" purposes. There's the rub.
.
It's not science. It's opinion.
The amount of nuclear fuel they carry is not much, even if they are not on such missions as in comet landing, even if they eventually end up re-entering the atmosphere of planet earth, they can be designed to burn up and disperse. It is not going to add any more radioactive pollution than coal fired power plants. These coal plants burn so many thousands of tons, even trace radioactive elements measured in parts per billion eventually adds up to some serious numbers. Some burnt satellite is not going be significant.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
(The following assumes that politics was the cause of not using Pu-238...) The toxic stuff had a half-life of only 88 years, and was encased in another element? AND only a few grams were necessary to power it for the entire mission? I'd expect that kind of fear and ignorance from politicians, but project managers overseeing projects like this need to cut through that FUD with facts gleaned from their knowledgeable subordinates.
I guess that going green doesn't always lead to a green light of success at the end of the mission.
I can't see how "nuclear fears" could possibly have anything to do with this. Most likely, the people fearing nuclear power aren't even aware of this project, and even if they were, they obviously had no say in it. Furthermore, those people clearly have much bigger fish to fry -- orders and orders of magnitude much bigger fish. Why in the world would they focus their efforts on this?
As it currently stands, neither solar or other renewables can come close to providing the energy needs of a 1st world country, and as more of the world develops, this need will only increase. That leaves fossil and some form of nuclear. Or, reducing energy usage. Get rid of everyones appliances, vehicles, heat pumps, exotic out of season foods trucked from halfway across the globe, etc, and you may come close. Do you want to be the one to force that on people?
Silence is a state of mime.
What bollocks is that? What has an RTG in space to do with a nuclear (fission) reactor on earth?
No one cares how you power your satellites, space probes.
I think the fear was that if the system broke up on launch (exploded, perhaps) that it would strew radioactive materials over a wide swath of landscape.
(To be fair, we've had a couple of satellite launches screw up in the last decade, so the probability of failure isn't zero.)
If the rocket blew up in our atmosphere, we would have had some serious issues to deal with. If there was a safe way to power the lander, you'd think they would have used it.
V'ger... expects an answer
Dear God, did you actually try reading what you posted? You sound like absolute imbecile. Punctuation would have helped marginally as would have getting rid of that run-on sentence. The only thing that would have really helped is if you hit "cancel" instead of "submit" because grammar rules cannot cover up stupid.
/. has commenters to provide a daily (ok, hourly) dose of whining over why some huge and largely successful research project or whatever got it all wrong because they didn't use some pet technology, where said technology would only have worked under ideal circumstances (i.e. a world in which everyone is totally cool with nuclear power) and in reality would have been completely impractical* due to, well, reality. If the article itself is a poorly designed rebuttal requiring billions of people to fundamentally alter their core modus operandi to address a relatively trivial shortcoming, what the hell are we supposed to do here?
*also applies to theories in political and philosophical debates. Don't take those away if you still want visitors to this site.
so much uninformed bs in one post, amazing.
Germany is generating a huge portion of its energy needs with solar power, and they're in a northern latitude without much sunlight. The US has no excuse, since most of it is farther south and very sunny (think of Arizona).
Philae was launched in 2004. NASA launched a Pu-238 radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) as part of the Mars Science Laboratory in 2011, and a Pu-238 RTG was being designed by NASA as late as 2013. Even if your claim is true, and Pu-238 became unavailable in the last two years (I doubt it), Pu-238 must have been available in 2004 since it was available as late as 2013.
Moreover, while Pu-238 has been used for the majority of space RTGs. It's not the only element that can be used. U-235 was used in space and Sr-90 has been used on the ground. I don't know about the availability of those isotopes, but Am-241 can also be used, and I doubt there's a shortage of that because it is used in many smoke detectors.
Yes, solar would have been fine if the harpoon worked. However, it is a good idea to build spacecraft to handle contingencies. Maybe there are good reason (cost, weight) that a RTG was not used, but the unavailability of proper isotopes sure wasn't one of them. I'm guessing the issue was mostly political.
After gulping the ad, you see a bunch of fossil photos from Philae, then a very basic pledge for embarking a small radioisotopic thermal generator (i. e. nuclear power).
This is silly twice.
First, because Philae is an entierely European craft, and there are just no space nuclear generators in Europe. You can call it wrong, but even on the European Huygens probe the much simpler nuclear *heaters* were US-provided.
Second, because the only available US RTGs are very big and heavy, and mass on this very light craft would totally have prevented to reuse an existing design. You can advocate one could have developed a miniature thing outputting just some watts. You would have been *wildly* out of budget.
So, well. A basic pledge for nuclear power in space, yes, be it good or bad.
But taking Philae as an example is a very wrong way to do get it. Self-deserving even, maybe.
Herve S.
Digital files at 11!
A real space program would use nuclear fusion, like the reactor built at the UW.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Oh, yeah, 2 grams of plutonium will totally cause that kind of destruction.
Everyone knows you need to tack on a PB-NUK to every probe if you'll be out of sunlight for longer than the batteries hold a charge.
It would have been totally ludicrous to equip Philae with a RTG. This would have meant a dramatically increased cost for probably little gain. The main mission is the orbiter - it works fine with solar panels. The lander had an estimated failure probability of 50%, and that was an optimistic estimation. In the case it lands, the lander was equipped with a battery for the prime scientific objective. For the icing on the cake cheap solar panels were added.
So this guy suggests to spend hundreds(?) of thousand Euros just for the totally unlikely event that a) the lander lands correctly and b) the lander bounces and c) the lander lands again in a shadow for d) the icing on the cake? He does not seem to understand how budgeting works.
Use RTGs for deep space missions, where they are needed.
How can this ignorant (or simly troll?) be a "NASA columnist"?
if nuclear fears were the case then where was the outrage when this was launched?
NASA has only enough for about 3-4 more missions before it runs out.
http://www.wired.com/2013/09/p...
The US doesnt manufacture the kind they need. They got some from dismantling Russian warheads, but no longer. The upcompiong Juno-Jupiter mission was converted to solar power, about the distance limit they can do with solar cells.
I'm definitely on the pro-nuclear side in general, but I wonder if, in the case of a probe on a comet, the heat given off by a RTG would be an issue. So much of what the probe is there to study is low sublimation point volatiles.
There is nothing "simple" about nuclear power.
For them to have gone to the trouble of doing an RTG solution for this would have been perceived as completely unnecessary, even if not for the 'oh no, nuclear' facet of it. It only made sense in retrospect because *TWO* things failed in a way that the lander managed to survive by incredible luck. If you were on the engineering team and someone said 'well, what if our harpoon system fails and our thrusters to control descent don't work and we can't slow the craft down, let's put in an RTG to work if we end up on the dark part of the comet', you would say 'if the descent thrusters fail to fire, the thing is pretty much toast anyway, the likelihood that we will hit that hard, survive, and not be tethered to where we are supposed to be is so thin that putting in an RTG to tolerate that is ridiculous.
The landers circumstances are very very unique and the RTG would have been a poor fit for the mission parameters if all went according to plan, and failing in this specific way is just so peculiar that it's silly to say they should have planned for this scenario with an RTG (as opposed to some other mechanisms to be triply sure they would get on the comet just right)
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
First of all, the Rosetta mission was a joint NASA-ESA mission, where NASA was in charge of providing the power supply. However, the US Congress pulled the funding on the mission and ESA had to do it alone. This was after most of the spacecraft was already designed.
Second, ESA never developed nuclear-powered spacecraft. Even though it is a policy choice due to the fears of blowing up nuclear material in the atmosphere, it is also reflection of a space agency created specifically for non-military purposes. While NASA is also a civilian agency, it has a strong connection with the US military and access to materials such as plutonium.
Third, different Nuclear Power sources in Space (NPS) have to be developed in order to guarantee the availability of the raw material. There is no point in developing a long-term programme based on rare or very hard to obtain nuclear materials.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Call it what it is, a radiological package, not really a nuclear package.
Go home, you're drunk. Again.
Nothing you're writing has any basis in science. It is complete and total bunk, displaying a serious ignorance of the topic you're discussing.
That's weird, I always thought that StartsWithABang was the Nerval's Lobster of medium.com.
But then I researched further... StartsWithABang is Ethan Siegel, who frequently promotes his own articles on medium.com under the Slashdot name StartsWithABang. In this case, his article was published on Forbes instead of medium.com. And, judging by the current top-rated posts, the Slashdot community perceives this article to be a troll.
I think I'll apply the same amount of skepticism to StartsWithABang's future submissions as I currently do with Nerval's Lobster and mdsolar's submissions.
The odds of any person being harmed by a nuclear accident are probably less than getting struck by lightning while suffering a shark attack.
On the plus side if all three happened at once you'd probably get superpowers. On the minus side you'd be Atomic Sharkman, so probably one of the bad guys destined to suffer defeat after a long monologue.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
They couldn't buy an RTG, didn't have the tech themselves, and so how exactly is this unnecessary?
It's totally unnecessary for you to walk to school, you should drive there. Except you're 5 years old and it's illegal.
Stupid article.
Just for the record, there's no overlap at all between radioisotope generators and nuclear bombs; they don't even use the same isotopes.
Ya but..... What if it blew up on takeoff?
And so is the asshat at forbes that wrote TFA.
In an hollywood movie, probably. Given that most people assume the following condition to be true: "holywood movie" == "reality", then yes, it would.
Hindsight is always 20/20.
I had to try to read what you posted three times to parse it. Only then did I realize the depth of the stupidity that I read. My response was meant as a public service for the good of humanity. Next time you might actually take a moment and think about what you write before you inflict it on the rest of us. If I only prevented one person from having to read a sequel to your moronic drivel then I have made the world a better place.
The radiator fins of the RTG would have probably got stuck into the surface of dust of the comet. (I.E. Heaviest portion of SAT, center of gravity, and all that sort of stuff). Net result, even worse, no contact at all, as the now insulated radiator fins reach same temperature as heat source, generating virtually no electricity. And without backup solar panels, not contact at all.
IMHO, I 'm really beginning to Hate these nuke advocates who claim that Nuclear power is god's gift to man, when in fact is it is a curse that will plague humanity for thousands of years to some.
It's actually several kilograms, but you were within a factor of a few thousand.
People who are the most concerned about nuclear energy understand these facts:
1) High-level radioactive waste is deadly to touch, hold, carry, etc., for hundreds of thousands of years. You can pick up a piece of this waste, hold on to it for a while, and be dead in a few days. Perhaps you picked it up, studied it for a while, and dropped it in the space of 15 minutes because it was sitting a pile of rocks.
2) Homo sapiens, our species, is believed to be between 100,000 and 200,000 years old.
3) We've only had writing for about 5,000 years, and in certain countries in sub-Saharan Africa only about half the population is literate in ANY language. Before the modern era, it's thought that no more than 40% of the world population was literate.
4) As we all know, the most advanced civilizations decline and are sometimes replaced by primitive civilizations. Among many other causes, formerly fertile land can become arid. Formerly great civilizations in Central America are now jungle with isolated tribes. Formerly fertile Northern Africa is a now great desert habited by nomadic people and not much else.
5) The world is ignorant about geology. We have no idea how to do fracking safely, even though it could probably done safely. The reason is we don't have enough understanding about how the ground beneath our feet works.
Nuclear energy, in its present form, produces a waste product that will outlive our species. We all hope that Homo sapiens will evolve into a better species, but there is no guarantee of that. Perhaps there will be a Homo successor that is more primitive. We can guess what that species will be like, but we're just guessing. It is of paramount importance that we are able to communicate with that successor species. Then we need to find a place to put the waste on Earth that is geologically sound, yet we can't even drill for oil safely without causing earthquakes. Good luck with that.
The inevitable will happen and the waste will somehow surface. Let's say that there is ample signage. How good are you at Sumerian cuneiform? I'm not so good at it, either. In fact, I don't even know a single symbol. At one time cuneiform was the premier go-to language, the English of its day, and it is only about 5,000 years old, give or take a few thousand years. If radioactive waste was labelled in cuneiform, I'd have to retain a scholar to understand the risk of the material. Can you even imagine how dissimilar a language 500,000 years from now will be from English? That's 100 times as long as the whole history of writing.
We're kidding ourselves by thinking this energy is clean. What we are doing, actually, is poisoning the land for hundreds of thousands of years. The built-in assumption exists that we'll be so advanced techologically speaking by then that future residents of Earth will have no problem dealing with any of it. In fact, I believe that the oppposite is true. We can't depend upon steady progress. Progress has always been in fits and starts, with intense periods of decline, and at times entire civilizations have dropped off the face of the Earth.
No, the article says that 1 kg would have been enough to completely power the entire mission, and only 2 grams would have been needed for a combination of Plutonium heating and solar power. That last option would have been enough (according to the article).
Renewables are far more *energy* efficient, so yes, I do want reduced *energy* use.
If I drive a mile in a petroleum fuelled car, I get (say) 30 mpg, in an electric car, it's >100 mpg(e). So: lower energy.
And heating; it takes a lot less energy to use a heat pump than it does to heat a building with fossil fuels, or nuclear. So again, yes, lower energy.
Energy is NOT the same as comfort, or economics.
And I don't trust nuclear power; and I say this as someone qualified in physics; there's no known way to stop nuclear reactors that are sized for generating power from melting down at least sometimes. They've said that it was 'safe' too many times before, it's like the boy the cried wolf, in reverse.
But it doesn't really matter; renewables are growing far too fast for nuclear to ever see a resurgence. Renewables are growing with double digit growth, nuclear is basically shrinking overall.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"1) The previous Slashdot discussions on Philae include some insightful comments on RTGs.
2) The Forbes article says that the project manager, Stephan Ulamec, cited political reasons for not using plutonium. There is no quote attributed to that, but another forum claims that it is in the youtube interviews of him. If he truly said this, shame on Forbes for not quoting him directly and leaving it uncited.
Can the USA do better, of course we can, and should. However, sticking your head in the mud and screaming no nukes is shortsighted at best and idiotic at worst.
Silence is a state of mime.
I think this would not be a good idea to send nuclear anything towards the sun, right? What would happen?
It's marked troll, but it's not wrong... Startswithabang should be renamed spamswithablog.
Yes a RTG would have worked without solar power. However, there are two main problems with an RTG. First, ESA does not have Plutonium-238. Therefore, they cannot built an RTG. NASA was short on supplies. Second, RTG units are heavy compared to solar cells. That would have increased lift-off mass which would have made the whole thing more expensive. And they had already money problems.
So yes, if NASA wouldn't have chickened out and would not have problems to get their hands on sufficient Plutonium for the RTG and they could acquire the funding, then they could have put an RTG in the probe. However, if one of the flipping landing mechanism would have worked as intended, it would have worked too. So all in all, we could have had more data from the mission in a number of hypothetical scenarios. But this is reality and so we have to work with that.
Germany is also being backed up by French nuclear reactors, so they have that. Where would the US get their backup power from? Mexico? Canada? The moon?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
What a load of shit the premise of the story is. No its NOT worth it to risk a nuclear accident and the release of dangerous nucleotides into the environment, and some people on Earth are capable of making the correct and precautionary decision to be safe. Trying to weight the practice of precaution against "7 months of data" is utter and complete bullshit.
The US has safely launched an armada of nuclear powered probes into the solar system for decades and will continue to do so. The euros have strangely talked themselves out of it.
Funny enough, just today I was watching a presentation in ESO with one of the leading scientists in this project. And it's a bit more complicated than I thought.
Unlike NASA, ESA never applied this technology, so they can't just use it in space probes. They would have to get in a partnership with NASA or to allow some years for the engineering teams working with them to find out how to use the technology correctly (we are talking about systems with very limiting energy and weight requirements here).
Then, even if they know how to apply it correctly, the probe would be launched using an Ariane taking off from French Guiana and, by French law, any nuclear device transiting in French territory would need to have an express signed order by the French president, allowing it.
I totally agree this is a baseless fear, but now, we are so deep into it that even if we wanted to use a nuclear power source, we would need to do it with great effort.
If there turns out to be any validity to the carbon warming hypothesis, "Going German" would be the worst thing we could do: panic building of wind and solar at massively subsidized prices, at the same time as we change the baseload from nuclear to coal. This would give us a surplus of overpriced small renewables and lots more carbon than we emit now.
Spoken like a true coward praying to your god. Get a clue and try actually responding with reason rather than drivel.
"In the binary alternative fork we sent up a nuclear powered satellite that failed ..."
This has already happened on several occasions, including the scenario of a crappy Soviet nuclear satellite dropping out of orbit. We're all still here. In the RTG launch accidents, the RTGs stayed intact.
http://listverse.com/2012/01/2...
First, is correctly states that ESA does not have an RTG and cannot acquire one, due to the lack of a seller. And then secondly, he claims (without proper reference, and I could not find any)) that this is due to political reasons. However, what you need to develop an RTG is (a) money and (b) Plutonium-238. This requires reactors capable to develop nuclear weapons material. While the US has only a few bits left from their program, certainly France and the UK do not have that much around. And other states, like Germany, do not have nuclear weapons and the means to create enough Plutonium without violating treaties. Therefore, an RTG is not an option.
It was pure unadulterated reason. The dosage was so high that your system could not handle it. If you are going to insult someone, then it must hit the mark not miss wildly like your infantile attempt at armchair psychology. Come back in a few years and try again, son.
Nothing you wrote is even the slightest bit likely to happen. How big of a reactor do you think they would send up there?
This is true, but when Chernobyl happened, basically everyone was moved out of the contaminated zone, and it remains deserted today. While people were exposed to radioactive material, it was for a relatively short time. I see no permanent evacuation of the city occurring in Japan. Radiation is bad in large doses over a short period of time, but it is also dangerous if people are exposed to constant low levels (more than the background radiation level) over long periods of time.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
LFTR maybe?
well, you could ship the fuel up to a LEO separate from the reactor in a container designed to survive catastrophic lunch failure to reduce the risk of fallout. It wouldn't be hard to ship it into space safely, so I think that particular worry is more FUD than a real concern.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
In fact, if we only wanted to use a tiny amount of Pu-238 to keep the electronics warm, we could have done exactly that — with the same solar technology — with an expenditure of only two grams of Pu-238. This is the strategy that Mars Opportunity employed, and it’s been roving on Mars successfully (and continuously) for over a decade now. In fact....
Terrible article. For someone who uses the phrase 'In fact' so much, he is off on several facts. One being that the Opportunity uses solar panels, not an RTG. Only the latest mars rover uses an RTG, Curiosity.
As other posters point out, this is an engineering decision with many trade-offs, some aspects of the engineering decision are influenced by politics. I build thermoelectric generators and work with NASA JPL, Nice attempt to twist a recent news story to push your world view.
Look, that nuclear power plant wasn't necessary except for HINDSIGHT, right?
It damn well wouldn't be given free, so it would have increased the cost for no apparent reason, right?
It would have weighed more, right? You know what that means on a probe package? Less science on board,right?
It's VERY unlikely the USA would have even let it be bought, because the USA is in a bit of a shortfall for RTGs too, right?
SO WHY THE FUCK do you keep whining about how "it was sooooo unnecessary, right, you could have used nuclear power, m'kay!". Because I can guarantee you one thing, THEY FUCKING WELL KNEW THAT RTGs EXIST!!!!
The level of radation in california is 8 disintegrations per cubic meter per second.
If correct then that rate is far, far lower than the level of radiation in Californians. The tiny amount of potassium-40 in the human body produces 4,400 disintegrations per second. Then there are other isotopes such as carbon-14 to consider so the actual rate of decays will be even higher. In fact if we assume the average Californian has a mass of 80 kg and a density roughly equal to that of water then the decay rate per cubic metre of Californians is just under 55,000 decays/second or 6,875 times your background rate just from potassium-40.
However you typically only get about about 10% of your annual radiation exposure in the US from the potassium-40, carbon-14 etc inside your body so I expect that your background radiation estimate is on the low side.
The fear is not of a nuclear device in a satellite, it's a nuclear device on top of a big canister of rocket fuel that's going to be ignited.
That fear might be overblown, but you can't argue against a fear if you don't correctly identify it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... I know he's a troll and it's highly edited, but it is relevant.
The real problem with Pu-238 is its source; the recovery of Pu-239 for weapons, from a Uranium fueled reactor.
You Can breed it in a high-neutron type reactor, but those are purpose built for research, and most research places won't let you breed something that has warhead-grade material as a side product. :)
I don't think there's anywhere in the EU that would admit to having those capabilities, let alone furnish material that proved it. :)
The US isn't making new material anymore, neither is Russia.
The Japanese was recycling Plutonium on some scale, before fukushima; maybe they could help.
There will have to be a Government Program to fund RTG generator research for Space; no-one else could do it.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
sig added for the benefit of the /. preview
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
The seven months of lost data were completely unnecessary,
A dangerous proposition. Some might counter it by questioning just how much the Philae's mission was really "necessary", and not just huge waste of funds and resources.
and resulted solely from the world's nuclear fears.
Or probably because world wants to push scientists to find alternatives?
Anyway. Nuclear power is one of those "not in my backyard" things. It's good - as long you live far enough from it. You do not "fear" it, unless it actually hits you. (And I am saying this as a person who as a child actually lived in the ex-USSR's area mildly affected by disaster of Chernobyl.)
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
We are literally running out of our Pu-238 supply for deep space missions. We are no longer making more, although we could be easily doing so for scientific purposes. It just costs a little bit of money.
For just a little bit of money, they could have built 2 Rosetta and 2 Philae (or 3, or 4) and sent them to 2 (3,4) different comets. That's just money, it's cheap.
chill due you sound like your what about 12 years old.
I find all the posts very educational and very interesting.
That the EU does not have nor are capable in education and technology of using let alone understanding Pu-238 for weapons against Greece gives me much satisfaction.
So the diabolical machinations of Ms. Merkel to exterminate the people of Greece will be unfulfilled, even by the racist dictator of the UN BON KI MOON.
Ha ja ha ja ha
I could have sworn I learned in school that the release of nuclear fuel in the upper atmosphere, like if a rocket exploded, would destroy the entire planet.
Your post was so idiotic that you don't deserve anything more that name calling.
The nuclear attitude to knowledge ratio, especially about RTG design and Pu238, is the highest I've yet seen in a Slashdot thread. It's like some bizarro-world Sesame Street in here with rabid muppets, shrill music, jumbled alphabets, speaking in tongues, flat-wrong math and horrid fonts, websites that require Javascript, and other horrors. Poor Cookie Monster expects some simple puzzle to solve so he can eat a plate of cookies but in swoop a screaming swarm of flying monkeys showing the same film clip of a mushroom cloud over and over again.
An attack on solar energy was sensed by the Solar Energy Promotion Apparatus, which is also the Nuclear Power Demotion Apparatus. Even the mod system has been overwhelmed and filter=insightful yields little insight because so many are modded up because they are quick with a Fukushima snipe. Let's go after StartsWithABang too, who had the audacity to claim that no contact for seven months was a mission 'fail'. Never mind that properly designed modern RTGs survive launch failure, even reentry failure. Never mind the equivalent ~12kg weight. A simple read of the Wikipedia RTF Page would take the Tang out of the snipes and push all of this fission stuff off-topic in one swoop. It's... cult-like in places. I won't be engaging.
So I'll just post... this.
IT IS TIME dip into the vault of Science and unleash a secret DOOMSDAY weapon, the RTG Powered Teddy Bear. A super-toy capable of sustained periods of play, yet self-charging with a heart of Pu238 that begins with ~2x nominal thermal output so you'd have over 100 years at full activity. The RTG is encased in a radiation proof, blast proof thermoelectric shell that is slightly larger than a six-year-old's gullet. It has adaptive intelligence, damage avoidance and a built-in sewing kit. It keeps your child warm at night, helps build muscle tone as it is carried, but can walk on its own with the same bipedal stance that makes human beings energy-efficient.
RTG Teddy will have the Wikipedia RTF Page embedded in its brain, and so he will be able to recite it you. (along with 10,000 bedtime stories from all cultures and fun language lessons). If you attempt to convince Teddy that he will explode like Chernobyl he will politely remind you that was runaway fission and steam. If you mention Fukushima he will point out that was just hydrogen. If you ask him if he might go 'critical' he'll tell you he will be critical of the mistakes you make, so you can always do better. Teddy even has a radiation monitor and his own power source is so well shielded he will help you identify those badly shielded knockoff bears when they come to visit. If you express an interest in nuclear energy he will start you off with the basics and you'll be a nuclear engineer by age eight, as driven as Kirk Sorensen. If mommy and daddy are talking downstairs and you hear mommy express concern that if Teddy crashes in a plane he might spread radiation over a wide area --- Teddy will whisper in your ear that it's alright, even though he would survive a crash and you wouldn't --- he would do his best to prevent it from happening because he contains an aviation network interface with autopilot and instrument landing procedures for all commercial airliners. He can even fly a helicopter with your help. And don't mind mommy, parents are weird sometimes. Could a solar powered bear do all this?
But the best part of owning an RTG Teddy is visiting with those Solar Powered Bears your friends bring over. He will beat the pants off them in feats of sustained endurance. But after he has mopped the floor with them he'll give them all a pulsed burst of ultraviolet light so they can finish the race without the indignity of falling over. He'll
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Only perfect if you have a cutoff date sometime after one was spread over a bit of Canada when a Russian Kosmos spy satellite came down. It was very widely reported.
When even "The Readers Digest" can refute the claims of someone it's very clear that they are not even trying.
This post is complete bullshit and ignores all the complications that come with nuclear power. First, the materials needed are expensive and procedures handling them are complex. Second, the payload would be significantly heavier, costing millions extra to lift it off Earth. Third, the mission was never intended to be long-term, so why stick a nuclear device on it?
with their "technical" ideology. Stellar IQ and still dumb, poor things.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/06/15/whats-really-going-on-at-fukushima/
Currently around 25,000 dead from the Chernobyl fallout.
Fukushima is even more deadly today than when the tsunami first hit. You're just aren't hearing about it any more. ...
Make your own conclusions about why not
While the rest of world's media reported this as "Wow! We've landed on a comet!", all the US media seemed to portray this as "huh, they did it all wrong".
Space exploration is not for Americans only, guys.
First point: capitalize properly.
Second point: "you're" is the word you are looking for.
Third point: "what" is grammatically incorrect and unnecessary.
Fourth point: If insulting someone, try not to sound illiterate.
Sadly, the amount of radioactive material usable for radioactive thermal generators is very limited. The reactors that create the material are banned by treaty.
I read one NASA report that the US has enough to make 3 more RTGs. I'm not sure what's available to the ESA.
Picture the scene:
Engineer: CEO-san we need to move those back-up generators to higher ground in case big tsunami hits us.
CEO: how high of a tsunami are we talking about?
Engineer: pretty high
CEO: what is the chance that such tsunami comes our way
Engineer : about once every 500 years
CEO: and how much this relocation will cost?
Engineer: it will eat 2% of the profit for a year
CEO: are you nuts? You think I will go in front of the shareholders and tell them they'd get 2% less this year because of something that might happen ONCE in 500 fucking years?! I am here for another 10 years and I retire after that. I'll take the risk that this will not happen on MY watch. And here is a wakizashi, go and commit harakiri right now you insolent brat!
Engineer: yes CEO-san
Only....the next CEO will say the same; the next one too...and over time the chances that the big tsunami will come approaches....1, while every CEO sees it as "no chance it will happen on my watch; I am only here for X number of years where X is way smaller than 500".
Disclaimer: I realize that no power plant will operate for 500 years but I also realize that once in 500 years can also mean tomorrow.
Conclusion: never run critical infrastructure, health care, education, military, police and transport on profit motive only. The real profit of those things running smoothly and efficiently regardless of "cost" is way higher than the profit a company will make running it, but this huge profit will be distributed over the whole of the economy rather than a much smaller profit in the pockets of a corporation, while the LOSSES incurred by them running the business badly is soaked by all of us.
Example: for every Nederlander on /. - anything to say about the NS [trains] and the health care system of the Netherlands once they were privatized and began to run ONLY on profit motive? The NS is lying like nobody's business about the delays [you know they consider cancelled trains as not delayed -those do not go into any statistics about the quality of service; those trains do not exists!WTF?!?] and spread the losses by not delivering millions of people to work on time. I won't be surprise if for every million they make they incur losses to all businesses that is 10 times higher. As for the health care system....well enough said [otherwise I'd have to write a novel]....
Misleading title
The ESA will have thought of possiblities and had reasons to do it this way. They are not fucking beginners.
Everyone has to get their transportation energy (or at least most of it) from oil; we don't have electric trucks yet, and very few people have electric cars, and electric airplanes aren't going to be a reality for quite some time. So that point is completely irrelevant; you can't use nuclear power to run cars and trucks.
So yes, you meant "electrical needs", not "energy needs".
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Infallible!!