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US Tests Nuclear Power System To Sustain Astronauts On Mars (reuters.com)
Initial tests in Nevada on a compact nuclear power system designed to sustain a long-duration NASA human mission on the inhospitable surface on Mars have been successful and a full-power run is scheduled for March, officials said on Thursday. Reuters reports: National Aeronautics and Space Administration and U.S. Department of Energy officials, at a Las Vegas news conference, detailed the development of the nuclear fission system under NASA's Kilopower project. Months-long testing began in November at the energy department's Nevada National Security Site, with an eye toward providing energy for future astronaut and robotic missions in space and on the surface of Mars, the moon or other solar system destinations. A key hurdle for any long-term colony on the surface of a planet or moon, as opposed to NASA's six short lunar surface visits from 1969 to 1972, is possessing a power source strong enough to sustain a base but small and light enough to allow for transport through space. NASA's prototype power system uses a uranium-235 reactor core roughly the size of a paper towel roll. The technology could power habitats and life-support systems, enable astronauts to mine resources, recharge rovers and run processing equipment to transform resources such as ice on the planet into oxygen, water and fuel. It could also potentially augment electrically powered spacecraft propulsion systems on missions to the outer planets.
I don't understand why they can't use hydro, wind or solar. Does NASA have to subsidize Big Oil and the nuclear industry? Damn you Trump, Damn you! ;)
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
There are more information about the Kilopower project at NASA: https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/kilopower
I'd be curious to see how they plan on cooling the thing. Yes there's lots of ice at the poles, but is there enough water anywhere else to be useable to cool the thing?
And similar problems emerge for the Moon.
Yes, it is roughly the same distance from the sun as Earth is (given that the moon orbits around the later, duh...).
And yes, no significant atmosphere means even more light available to a moon base than to earth surface solar pannels...
But being tidally locked to earth and with a approx 28-day orbit around it means that the Moon base's solar panels are guaranteed to be in the dark for 2 whole weeks (unless you go even more crazy with orbital mirror reflecting light toward the solar panels, etc.)
Batteries could be a solution, adding a nuclear power source to supplement the solar specially during moon night is another.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Turns out Mars has significant amounts of Thorium, particularly near a latitude recently found to have significant amounts of ice. The ice could be melted by and cool a thorium reactor, and electrolyzed to produce rocket fuel. There's plenty of open space on Mars to put a thorium reactor without any NIMBYs nearby worrying about strong gamma emitters or long-lived nuclear waste contaminating the environment. We could drop a few centrifuges on the planet and run them on solar for years, slowly accumulating usable fissile material before the first astronauts touch down. Of course some infrastructure to load them up would be required... but there's almost certainly going to be a need, for one reason or another, for some type of heavy backhoe drone moving soil around anyway (digging out a pit for a sub-surface habitat, getting to ice deposits, flattening landing zones, etc.)
Of course, by the time NASA gets their ass to Mars, we'll already have fusion reactors.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
This reactor is amazing - it's completely passive. It's self-regulated by thermal expansion of its fuel. There are no moving parts (apart from a heat engine), the reactor is started by removing one control rod and then it just runs on until fuel is exhausted.https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/18/01/18/2148243/us-tests-nuclear-power-system-to-sustain-astronauts-on-mars#
The first few will be expensive, so we probably want to wait for the second wave when they go into mass production
you may be trolling. But just in case you are merely ignorant, and have been living under a rock your whole life:
Uranium does not need water for working electricity. Like all heat engines, what is required is a place to dump the waste heat - to keep the cold end cold (relatively speaking). On Earth, that is efficiently done with evaporative cooling, but that's hardly the only way. How much water does a household Honda generator require? The nuclear sources on the Voyager space probes radiated heat directly into space. The Curiosity rover on Mars - also nuclear-powered - also uses a passive radiator.
There is water on Mars. That is the conclusion of more than two decades of exploration. (Science: it works, bitches!) Water isn't necessarily abundant (i.e., no oceans or rivers these days), but it is there. Some of it is briny subsurface moisture, most of it is ice, and some is tenuous vapor in the atmosphere. All plans for human exploration and colonization on Mars plan to make use of local water.
The same is true with the Moon: it has water. It's less widespread and abundant, but it is there. The best places to find it appear to be in polar craters that are in near-constant shadow.
You do know that water is used to turn a turbine to generate electricity in nuclear power plant. The heat from fission reaction heats water to steam that turns a turbine that generates electricity. Heat from a nuclear reaction is not directly turned into electricity. There's an intermediary step, conversion of heat into mechanical energy. That's where water comes in.
So without a proper explanation of how this reactor works, people would assume water is used to turn a turbine (or piston in this case) to generate electricity.
This reactor uses a Stirling engine. A Stirling engine "is a heat engine that operates by cyclic compression and expansion of air or other gas (the working fluid) at different temperatures, such that there is a net conversion of heat energy to mechanical work." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
So the heat from the fission reaction essentially compresses/expands gas that moves a piston to generate electricity. In this case water is not needed
You might want to do some research first before spouting off like a jackass.
That's what is in a nuclear bomb.
The article has a perfectly good explanation of how this reactor works: the heat drives a Stirling engine. If "people" don't know what a Stirling engine is or how it works, there is Wikipedia (as you linked). If "people" erroneously assume that a Stirling engine requires water, well, I'm not going to spare a lot of sympathy, especially when responding (as I was) to an anonymous coward, and especially when that anonymous coward is making three factually incorrect statements and somehow implying that he knows more than NASA does.
The NASA of old was an engineering organization; they would have known to take two of these power units for redundancy. Today's NASA is a pure bureaucracy, and as such, somebody should tell them to take two of these units to Mars.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
That would be true of the radiothermal devices often used in many satellites and rovers, which use the heat from the decay of fairly radioactive elements to generate electricity. But this is a fission reactor, not a radiothermal generator.
The thing with fission fuel is, generally speaking, it's not particularly radioactive. You could eat it, and the heavy metal poisoning would kill you before the radiation did. U-235 for example has a half-life of 703.8 million years (longer=less radioactive) - common carbon and potassium isotopes are far more radioactive. It's the stuff with half-lives in the days to decades range that's really dangerous. Which does include a lot of the fission byproducts (aka high-level nuclear waste), but a fresh reactor, or replacement fuel rods, won't contain much if any of those.
The only real radiation risk with nuclear fuel in a launching accident is that it *doesn't* blow up, but instead lands in one piece someplace out of the way where it doesn't get discovered, with the fuel all mashed together into a critical mass that goes on fissioning unsupervised, bleeding nuclear waste into the environment for decades. But that's *extremely* unlikely.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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"light enough to boost to mars" Along with the 30 KT of lead needed, plus the cooling system, and the turbine?
I think not.
The contact face has to be kept flat to nanometers, while under 300G AND impact with the initiator UNMOVING at the impact point.
Easy?
I call Bullcrap
Cooling tower = water (or some other heat transfer fluid)
the atmosphere on mars is a pretty good thermos bottle
Given that it is the Trumpies who have murdered 18 people, DOUBLING last year's kill rate and antifa has murdered exactly ZERO people, your venom is spraying as uselessly as the spittle from your lips
RTGs are radioactive. Nuclear fuel is not.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Everyone knows potatoes draw their power from the souls they devour, and there just aren't going to be enough people on Mars for that to work for quite some time.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
If humans are going to stay on Mars any length of time, they'll have to develop Martian power systems, not depend on hot boxes from Earth. Doesn't matter if it's solar, wind, chemical, or nuclear, Mars will need to generate its own power. Power and water. After that, you're on your own.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Every time I see a phrase like "Repuke" or "Dumbocrat", I realize I'm speaking with a moron. It's a nice indicator, sort of like a giant hat that tells me "Nothing this person says is of importance". It leaves my brain with more space and time to ponder important things, like cat videos.
Amazingly enough the Kilopower family of space power systems are designed to operate in space, i.e. a really good vacuum. How do they do it? The way all spacecraft do, with radiators that dispose of heat through thermal radiation. Thin though the atmosphere is on Mars, it should enhance the performance of these radiators.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
A compact, low cost, fission reactor for exploration and science, scalable from 1 kW to 10 kW electric
Novel integration of available U-235 fuel form, passive sodium heat pipes, and flight-ready Stirling convertors
Would provide about 10x more power than the Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator
some perspective :
Power systems used on previous robotic missions (e.g. Spirit/Opportunity, Phoenix, Curiosity) do not provide sufficient power: all less than 200 W
source (with pictures!) : https://www.nasa.gov/sites/def...
And the radiator transfer fluid?
I bet you can guess!
What I'd like to do with this technology is to live in the mountains completely off of the grid. I'd have to find a solution for internet access but this would answer all of my power needs. Plus I assume it to be cheaper than the grid