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NASA Successfully Tests New Nuclear Reactor For Future Space Travelers (npr.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy say they have successfully tested a new type of nuclear reactor that could one day provide juice to colonies on other worlds. The reactor can power several homes and appears able to operate in harsh environments. The new reactor uses more-conventional uranium fuel. Using a "core" about the size of a paper towel roll, the reactor can turn pistons that can run a generator. The generator can put out about 10 kilowatts of electrical power -- enough to run a few small homes. Scientists believe it could run continuously for a decade or so, making deep space travel a lot simpler. They also gave it a catchy acronym: KRUSTY, which stands for Kilopower Reactor Using Stirling TechnologY.
To see if it actually worked, scientists tested KRUSTY out in the Nevada desert on America's old nuclear test range. They put KRUSTY through its paces, culminating in a 28-hour test at full power. The team also simulated failures in KRUSTY's reactor components to show it wouldn't result in a meltdown on Mars. KRUSTY may find its way onto future space probes. Researchers say they might use an ensemble of four or five of the reactors to power colonies on the moon (which has 14-day nights, when the sun isn't available) or Mars.
To see if it actually worked, scientists tested KRUSTY out in the Nevada desert on America's old nuclear test range. They put KRUSTY through its paces, culminating in a 28-hour test at full power. The team also simulated failures in KRUSTY's reactor components to show it wouldn't result in a meltdown on Mars. KRUSTY may find its way onto future space probes. Researchers say they might use an ensemble of four or five of the reactors to power colonies on the moon (which has 14-day nights, when the sun isn't available) or Mars.
Can buy one for my house?
As in "the clown?" Hopefully no one there is named Bart.
I don't know what kind of house they are powering, but without natural gas or propane for the water header and furnace, 10kw isn't going to cut it for one home much less multiple homes. I use a 14kw generator on my house. It's capable of running my well water pump, 2 ton A/C, and incidental loads. It cannot run the hot water heater, 4 ton A/C, Oven, dryer, etc.
It's nicely at a power point where it could power a small apartment building and recharge all the electric vehicles fully overnight. If it were 30KW it could even power a highway capable SUV. While one might worry about crashes, remember these thermo-nuclear-electric power packs on sattelites are hardened to survive a rocket explosion and hard re-entry.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
This is impressive but with the NASA designed EmDrive this will not be needed in the future when we colonize other stars and planets.
I find it amusing they call nuclear "old-fashioned", when Fission was only discovered in 1938... granted photovoltaic may be newer, but we've known about solar and wind power (and combustion) in varying methods of harvest for millennia.
the real at&t mix
The idea of the neighborhood reactors. They were to be powered by uranium hydride and be the size of a garden shed. Did these ever come to fruition? https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/nov/09/miniature-nuclear-reactors-los-alamos
Instead of igniting a mixture of fuel and air in the classic internal combustion engine, which comes with all sorts of environmental problems, this new reactor creates tiny nuclear explosions inside the cylinders, carefully timed to move the pistons up and down in the right order to turn a crankshaft connected to generator.
and a real orbital space station, instead we have a large number of millionaire beaurocrats
Use ganged tesla turbines. The problem with the tesla turbine is that it is only efficient in a very narrow speed/load range, but that's trivially solved by using multiples. Using multiples means backup/redundancy, and tesla turbines have only one moving part.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
We are nowhere near the point where we need to worry about powering a space colony, so why is NASA wasting money on this part ? Probably some senator getting a good deal.
I already have a space heater in my house.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I'll notify NASA immediately to stop work on this and switch to your design.
NASA monitors Slashdot at +5 to find the right way to do things. NASA's management figured out years ago that the science and engineering PhDs have nothing on a Slashdotter.
See, all those hours in the company's basement telling people, "Have you tried turning off and on again?" allows them to think big thought. And years of experience coding Javascript makes a Slashdotter an expert on space travel.
I find it amazing that in this day and age we still have not figured out how to pull energy directly from the source. A nuclear reactor is just a fancy steam engine that uses hot rocks to generate steam. Surely there is a way to harness the radiation as an energy source that doesn't involve using the waste heat.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
On the other hand, he died herpes free.
Where are you going to dissipate ten kilowatts' worth of waste heat? Or does this device somehow escape the Carnot cycle?
Hey, I could use something like that in my back yard for powering crypto mining rigs. :-P
We are nowhere near the point where we need to worry about powering a space colony, so why is NASA wasting money on this part ?
Because if you don't have an adequate power system you NEVER will have a space colony. It's job number one. If you don't have adequate power system there is no mission. Literally every other part of the mission depends on it. Any form of transportation is fundamentally contingent upon having a reliable power supply with a power to weight (and volume) ratio adequate to the mission parameters. With a sufficiently small and powerful energy supply, nearly any mission is possible. Without it no mission is possible.
Sure, but it's hardly the most difficult or pressing issue.
Umm, yeah it pretty much is the biggest issue. Literally every mission depends on having an power supply with usable power, weight, and volume parameters. EVERY mission. Manned or unmanned - it doesn't matter. EVERY mission requires a power supply.
Developing a rocket and lander so we can put heavy objects safely on the surface of the Moon/Mars is a bigger challenge.
There is no point in launching stuff into space unless you can power the stuff once it is in space. They go hand in hand. There are missions that are literally impossible with the currently available power supplies. To do those missions you need a better power supply. Launching into orbit could be literally free and if you don't have a power supply adequate to the mission parameters there still will be no mission.
Also, without a rocket, a power supply is useless. A rocket without a power supply can be used for plenty of other missions.
Really? Name one mission that doesn't require a power supply. A mission needs a power supply to be a mission. It also needs a rocket to get to where the mission needs to go. It's not an either/or proposition. You need both.
They wanna send these things into space? Screw that, we need those HERE on planet Earth. Mass produce those babies!
Clean energy for all, in a compact ruggized enclosure? I mean if someone takes it apart and dies from radiation, well that's on them.
You just need to be reasonably confident that you can make one in time for the actual launch. You don't need one sitting in the lab right now before you can start working on the other tasks.
Pray tell how you plan to be "reasonably confident" unless you are actually working on one? Research sometimes gets done sooner than you expect. Sometimes it takes longer. If you know you'll need a piece of technology you start working on it as early as your budget will allow to give the maximum amount of time to figure it out. If you are done early, great. Move on to other things. But procrastination is not your friend when every other part of the mission depends on it.
50K items on a checklist, 1 CHECKED. Assuming it doesn't use water cooling, hopefully it is a molten salt reactor type, which meltdown safely and seal themselves safely.
Move on to the next item on the list.
Of course, I want to know when I can have a Mr. Fission under my kitchen sink powering my home for 20 yrs at ... running some numbers ... for less than $9K. That is what I think electric will cost us during that time. /. didn't exist, but I would have gotten the RSS feed.
Plus we'll be able to remove the gas for heating and hot water, but will still need gas for cooking. Nothing can replace a flame for cooking!
BTW, I worked at NASA-JSC, but not in power generation. I was just a rocket scientist coding GN&C stuff. Back then,
No need to harden the reactor. Ship it without the U installed. The U can be in a separate hardened container and installed in the reactor at the destination if the transit is trouble free.
Notion here is nuclear reactor in a SUV. So the SUV is the destination. In so much as 'hardening' it takes a couple feet of lead to keep the gammas and ~4 MeV neutrons away - and that is the incident energy of the thing, no matter the size. I don't know about you, about a couple cubic feet of lead (not counting reactor) combined with 30Kw of motive power makes for a good day to walk (you might win that race, too).
I LOL'ed for real, thank you.
Kilopower Reactor Using Stirling TechnologY
Built Using Refinery-Grade Energy Reactants
By "hardening" I was referring to the U remaining contained after an explosion and/or crash (launch failure, etc). Basically that keeping a specialized U container from leaking seemed a simpler problem than keeping a fueled reactor from leaking.
Will they call it KRUSTY the clown?
This thing is categorically NOT designed for colonies, though they could be shoehorned into doing the job early on in the absence of anything better. They just don't deliver enough power - their own example has four of the scaled-up 10kW models combined to deliver enough power for a single initial outpost - 40kW will keep a small research outpost alive, but provides very little excess energy to fuel ecosystem and industry growth, both of which would be critical for a colony.
These are designed primarily for research missions, especially robotic deep-space missions to Jupiter and beyond, where solar ceases to be particularly useful. Currently we mostly use RTGs to power for such missions, but those deliver very little power (typically hundreds of watts at the most), which severely limits the possible mission scope.
And as far as colonies and outposts are concerned - with a little luck the BFR will enable high payload round trips to the moon within the next decade, possibly well before then. At that point both research outposts and aggressive robotic exploration become far more relevant, and it'd be nice to have a thoroughly tested power system ready long before then so that early missions can focus on how to maximize it's utility, rather than trying to develop that as well.
Between the SpaceX BFR, Bigelow inflatable habitats, and now Kilopower reactors, we have a good chance of having all the necessary components for a lunar outpost ready to deploy within a mere handful of years - that's something that couldn't be realistically considered even 5 or ten years ago. That moves the conversation from "Can we do this?" to "What should the mission profile be?" That's huge progress, and if we start seriously planning now, we just might have a solid mission plan ready by the time it becomes possible.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It should be noted that a block of U235 represents a tremendously reduced radiation risk than an RTG (which inherently has crazy "hot" isotopes on launch, because that is how it works).
Once the reactor has been running for a while, you will get crazy "hot" isotopes, but the theory is not to run the reactor until the probe is far enough away from earth.
On the other hand, should the U235 survive a launch failure but end up in the wrong hands, say someone working on a weapon...well that is another issue.
Maybe this is the power supply for Robotics?
An RTG uses Pu-238 which is an ideal fit because of its half-life (long enough to provide power for decades, short enough to provide usable amounts of power), and because it emits pretty much alpha radiation only, which is really easy to shield. It also needs no liquid cooling, making it fairly easy to stick the Pu in a launch-failure-survivable container.
There is some prior art here. The Slowpoke reactor was designed decades ago as a very safe, low maintenance, largely self-regulating reactor. And importantly in this context, the Slowpokes are invariably small, right in the 20 kW power output range.
However Slowpoke uses a lot of water. I'm betting that NASA didn't want to haul all that water into space.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLOWPOKE_reactor
Something conveniently left unsaid - the neutron or other radiation from this tiny reactor. That's a HUGE problem for electronics in space.
I worked on concepts for Prometheus/Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Icy_Moons_Orbiter) that was going to carry a several hundred kW reactor based power supply. Having that much power available is wonderful as a spacecraft designer - heck, usually you worry about carefully conducting heat away to radiators to cold space - with 200kW, you can run a refrigerator. And who cares how inefficient your RF power amplifier is?
in any case, there was a huge shield behind the reactor, and the entire (enormous, 58 meters long) spacecraft was triangular, to stay in the "radiation shadow" of that shield, helped by the 50 meter distance, too. Spacecraft people are used to dealing with particles like protons and electrons, and heavy ions. Neutrons, though, are something unique.
In deep space, how do they dissipate the heat generated by the reactor?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
One of the main driver for Kilopower development is the lack of available Pu-238 and low capacity for its future production. This is seriously affecting missions to Jupiter and beyond.
Kilopower requires only enriched uranium (of which the US has plenty) and can actually deliver more power than feasible RTGs. It's also inherently launch safe, until the reactor is turned on, it's basically a lump of naturally occurring metal.