Clean Nuclear Launches? 838
AKAImBatman writes "When it comes to launching millions of pounds of material into space, nearly everyone knows about the Orion Project. Blow up a series of nuclear bombs under your dairy-aire and ride the explosion on up. Unfortunately, the Orion spewed out so much radiation that it just wasn't a feasible launch option. If we want commuter trips to space, we're going to have to find another way. Well, it turns out that NASA's been doing quite a bit of research on Gas Core Nuclear Rockets, an ultra-powerful nuclear rocket that puts out almost no radiation. This research has spurred a fascinating new generation of ideas on reaching the cosmos. Could inexpensive cruises to the moon happen within our lifetimes?"
Two Words (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Two Words (Score:0, Insightful)
(Did it say 1 g of plutonium or 1 pound? What's the conversion ANYWAY?!!)
Public Perception (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Two Words (Score:3, Insightful)
I can imagine the protests now... (Score:5, Insightful)
A few years back, I remember there being some amazingly loud protests from some anti-nuclear power folks about the dangers of a deep space probe going up with a nuclear power source. Those folks were worried about the danger if the rocket blew up on the pad or the 1 in 100,000 or so chance the probe would hit the earth on one of its acceleration orbits.
Just imagine how happy these folks will be with a nuclear powered rocket, even if the scientific community claims that they are safe. After all, it's nuclear related, so it's gotta be bad!! (tongue firmly in cheek)
Re:My favorite part... (Score:5, Insightful)
Quick, someone ban the sun.
And stop people from living in Denver or flying on planes or going skiing in the mountains.
And let's not forget xray machines, cathode ray tubes (TVs and computer monitors to you non-engineers).
And what about that deadly substance known as "granite" that releases radioactive radon?
Re:Two Words (Score:5, Insightful)
1) We don't have space elevators. Simple as that. Until the day they are reality, we need something better then conventional rockets.
2) Once in space, either through the use of these rockets or a space elevator, these would be extremely useful for getting around the solar system, or at least roaming our backyard (the moon) or visiting next door (Mars).
IANARS (rocket scientist), but I enjoy learning about developments in space tech. The nuclear engine, while different versions having been developed and tested decades ago, still looks to be the next best thing in space travel.
Re:Two Words (Score:5, Insightful)
This is an education issue mainly.
If people can believe we have designed black boxes that survive being slammed into the Pennsylvania crust at 400 mph or the disintegration of its containing shuttle at 30000 feet - why is it a stretch to believe we can make a containment system for fissile material that would survive even catastrophic launch failure?
Re:Space Elevator (Score:5, Insightful)
But unfortunately, the space elevator will be so obscenely expensive in terms of resources and labour to get going in the first place that though amortized over a large number of launches, the cost would indeed be low... they probably won't be willing to wait that long to recover their costs, so launches that way would be even more expensive than the methods we use currently.
Re:Two Words (Score:5, Insightful)
Two more words for you: Suspension bridge.
When you can build a 40,000-millimeter suspension bridge out of carbon nanotubes and cross the river near the campus materials lab building, then you can start fantasizing about a 40,000-kilometer space elevator.
Until then, NERVA is the only way to go. Everything else is still at the research stage.
Re:Two Words (Score:4, Insightful)
An object the size of a shoe box (big shoes) that weight roughtly 30 pounds, slamming at 400mph, is not the same as a truck-size object weighting 30 tons at the same speed.
The lighter object's mass can easily be dealt with, whereas a 30 ton mass requires significantly more energy to bring to a stop.
Re:You don't say (Score:3, Insightful)
Google for "B-52" or "Tu-95". It's been done.
Heck, during the era of surface nuclear tests, we detonated dozens of the damn things above ground. Kinda sucked to be immediately downwind. Wasn't the end of the world.
Considering where we're launching the nuclear rockets from, and considering we're designing the reactors in those rockets not to blow up, I'd happily volunteer to ride on a boat anywhere underneath the flight path of any launch vehicle containing a nuclear-powered spacecraft or its components. Hell, I'd volunteer to ride on the launch vehicle.
Define Please (Score:1, Insightful)
Define "almost".
Well (Score:5, Insightful)
No.
See, here's the problem:
Nothing is permitted any more without a "business case" being made for it. No document, no invention, no idea, no presentation is countenanced unless it has 20% annual growth and the accountants and the management committee sign off on it.
Since it is impossible to get a bureaucracy to sign off on anything, nothing is permitted at all.
Small businesses and entrepreneurs are starved for capital. Large businesses and management committees have substantial capital, but refuse to invest it. Therefore, there is no capital; or, if there is, it is usually totally inadequate.
Middle management has a perfect series of questions for ideas like this. There is nothing in the world easier than criticizing an idea. Questions like "what do we need that for?" and "yeah, but how do you know it will work?" or "how can you be sure that will sell?" These questions are asked as if an answer is expected. The questions are followed by the comments: "It'll never work," and "sounds expensive" and "why can't we just use $OTHER_IDEA?"
But no answer is expected. The people asking the questions simply want to see how well the "idea person" can ad lib and how many bullshit one-liners and jokes they can reply with. After the middle managers have been entertained, a cocktail party laugh will circle the room, and the idea person will be escorted out of the building and into obscurity as the five-foot-wide-asses return to their bean salads.
As long as this continues, the rate of invention and "innovation" will be reduced to unmeasurably small levels. No vision, idea or invention can surmount well-funded cynicism. Brilliant, well-educated people's minds are being wasted because they report to lying, cheat fuck, greed-driven managers.
Middle management routinely turns its back on paying customers and competition-less markets. How the fuck are they ever going to accept a new "unproven" idea?
They won't.
Re:Two Words (Score:5, Insightful)
3) How are we supposed to get the space elevator up in the first place?
Re:No radiation == Nuclear war (Score:3, Insightful)
What the Orion researches choose to research or not research has no effect on what other people choose to research and not research.
Repo Man said it best... (Score:3, Insightful)
Besides, nobody's going to be sending a nuclear rocket into orbit anywhere near me, so I don't mind. Let the Floridians suck it up! They're already addled from all that solar radiation beating down on their pates and overheating their brains - a bit more won't make much difference...
"Almost no radiation" != "None" (Score:3, Insightful)
Within our lifetime? (Score:5, Insightful)
My hope is that advances in medicine will extend my life to 150+ years so I can see more of these things come to pass.
Re:Two Words (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember when Cassini went up, with a little thermal nuclear battery? It would have taken something like a direct DU antitank round to split that casing; a crash never would have done it.
NASA pointed this out, repeatedly, and stated the very safe history of these devices. Nevertheless, there were swarms of people protesting at NASA. They showed footage of families with children crying; the parents had told them that the rocket was going to crash and the radiation would kill them all.
You can't reason with these people any more than you can reason with conspiracy theorists. They know what they "know" and if you tell them different, you're a god-damn liar.
This is the same reason that NMR is now called MRI. Nuclear bad, magnets good! If they put that magnet inside a pyramid, people would pay to sit inside it for no reason.
Re:Public Perception (Score:4, Insightful)
Not to mention the fact that your average coal burning plant simply doesn't have the potential to cause a catastrophe on the scale of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, etc. Nuclear power is great except for (a) the waste and (b) the very rare but very destructive accidents. Once (a) and (b) can be dealt with more sensibly I'll be a supporter.
Re:I can imagine the protests now... (Score:5, Insightful)
My suspicion is that Nuclear technology will get nowhere in the United States until people stop calling it that, due to the huge political movement to make sure no one uses anything with "nuclear" in the name, regardless of the safety, degree of research, or degree of oversight. I'd propose scientists start using some other word, like "happytronic", but this would probably be seen through as "hollow PR from the nuclear industry". (That's another thing. People promoting nuclear energy are often derided as "Nuclear Industry Shills", but people attacking it are never successfully labelled as "Coal Industry Shills", despite the fact that's who they're primarily helping. How is this?)
This is the primary promise Fusion offers IMHO-- because oh, it isn't nuclear, it's "Fusion", right? Which means people will actually use it.
Perhaps we should start researching some kind of "hybrid" technique, which would allow the creation of reactors that can be claimed to be "fusion" although they're actually just fission reactors with some kind of technique involved that has something vaguely to do with fusion.
Re:Well (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Two Words (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:New idea for causing massive damage! :) (Score:3, Insightful)
Somewhere, long, long ago, architects were sitting around talking about this huge, incredible building that would be a real monument to captalism and a center for world trade.
Someone said "wait... what if something smacks into it? If it hit it hard and high enough, the impact could severe the support in the building and bring enough material down fast enough that the rest of the structure would implode. That's a lot of steel and concrete falling an awful long way!"
And someone said "That's a worry for another day. Let's build it first and think about that later."
Ok, so maybe that didn't really happen. But the point remains - you'd need to plan for ANY eventuality. Rogue airplane or stray meteorite, I'm sure there's SOMETHING that could break it.
Of course, as others have mentioned, the whiplike structure of it would either burn up on entry or it would just float to the ground over a wide area (mainly ocean) so it wouldn't be much of a threat.
The point still stands though - it's not a good idea to "think about it later" when you're dealing with something this expensive and important.
Re:Two Words (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:New idea for causing massive damage! :) (Score:3, Insightful)
Okay, I can see that being easy.
Now, imagine TIMING such an event so that the counterweight ends up headed right for a lunar base.
I can't see that being easy, though. It depends on an impressive list of things, foremost amongst them is there being a lunar base in any sort of position to be hit by the counterweight. It's not like you can aim; all you can do is time the break.
The people building the elevator and lunar base, on the other hand, CAN aim -- they can choose to move the location of one or the other over by a few feet or miles, and make an impact opportunity vanishingly rare or even impossible.
Of course, they can't do that if they never think of it, so it's good that you and others like you are looking for the loopholes.
-Billy
Re:Public Perception (Score:3, Insightful)
I know it would be terribly hard to come up with a side by side comparison between nuclear and fossil fuel's impact in the world but you can't discount nuclear on 1-2 big cases. It's like saying you won't fly because of plane crashes but you will drive in a car.
So I would say a) I would rather have a relatively small amount of something that I know is dangerous stored is a secured place which I can spend millions to protect, than have toxins floating in the air everywhere and b) new technologies are inherently unstable no matter what, there will be accidents which will decrease over time. Everything we use today was much more dangerous when it first came out but has gotten safer over time as we have learned more about it( cars, electricity, ships, planes, etc )
-Comedian
Re:Two Words (Score:3, Insightful)
So how big is a reactor core? Forget about making your entire satalite out of something that can survive any inpact/re-entry, and build just the core container. You don't never need all the connections that good, so long as your core is designed so it can't explode (not a big deal). Satalite breaks up, but it protects the reactor core while it does so, then the core in the small strong box falls to earth and is recovered.
Re:Two Words (Score:5, Insightful)
"stick it in a fast [nationalcenter.org] reactor [berkeley.edu] and use it again".
except that made the know-nothings even more scared of their own shadows, so politics and fear-mongering killed that too.
if you think that proves anything about nuclear waste reprocessing as such, then you would indeed be thinking irrationally. if, however, you get a sneaking suspicion that the simple explanation - namely, that whoever operated that particular plant were a bunch of goofball morons who shouldn't have been trusted to operate a toaster - might after all be more likely, then perhaps there is still hope for your rationality and sense.
how, exactly, is that a problem with nuclear power?
that is a problem with people. don't blame nuclear power for your belonging to a race of goofball morons. if you let humanity's inherent flawedness scare you away from doing anything at all remotely dangerous - because, ohmygoddess, we might fuck it up somehow, because we are so goddamn motherfucking stupid, we can't trust ourselves with pointy sticks even, we might poke our eyes out, won't somebody think of the children - then nothing will ever get done. at all. by anybody.
yes, nuclear power carries some risks. so does every other damn thing you will ever think of. as a general rule of thumb, the more worthwhile and useful things you can think of will be proportionally more dangerous. that's life - deal with it.
WooWooWoo!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
The author of this piece is almost certainly dumbing it down big time, but he makes sense. I don't see any logical inconsistencies or wishful thinking here.
The thing I do understand is the following statement:
" I believe there is a huge pent-up demand for resources in space, and if we could put huge payloads into orbit, uses for those payloads would appear quickly."
Exactly! If weight isn't so all fired important you can build it simpler, faster and cheaper, which lets you build more, which allows economies of scale, which allows research into how to make it better, lighter, stronger, for cheaper... and so on and so forth. Not all feedback loops are bad.
My post doesn't add a whole lot, I know, but this is beyond cool. It may even be possible. Thanks.
Re:I can imagine the protests now... (Score:5, Insightful)
on the other side of the pond, you'll find countries like france who have quite the nuclear arsenal as well (as i recall, france has more of a nuclear arsenal than china, and is third or fourth in the world?) but also get the vast majority (74% or so? that was in my high-school days) of their power from nuclear plants. and they're not worried about it. it was also france that had, what was it called
germany, on the other hand, is heading to dismantle and sell its nuclear reactors in favor of
it is very much a problem of perception. just don't use the words 'radiation', 'emission', 'atomic', 'split', 'neutron', 'proton', 'electron', 'blast', 'coil',
Re:Two Words (Score:5, Insightful)
Quite irrational. Chernobyl was an inherently flawed reactor design. It can't happen in our superior reactors. Anyway, it didn't kill all that many people. TMI didn't kill or injure anyone. And a dirty bomb's radiation wouldn't cause very much harm. The blast would be the main thing. And hiroshima. Fuck. That's a bomb designed to kill people! Of course its dangerous.
Oh, and once you're done telling me how safe modern nuclear reactors are, let's go on the tour of Hanford together, okay? I'm counting on you to hold my hand during the scary parts, like when the nuclear waste enters the water table.
I live just a few miles away from Hanford. I don't know where the fuck you get your news, but the radiation at Hanford isn't harming anything. The place is a wildlife preserve, one of the best shrub-steppe desert habitats in the wast. The radiation from the waste leakage is inconsequential compared to what you get from the sun every day.
Nuclear power, historically, has been very safe. Certainly compared to coal power, with its smog and mountains of toxic coal waste. Don't listen to idiotic ultra environmentalists.
Re:No radiation == Nuclear war (Score:3, Insightful)
I call bullshit.
Source, please. Some relevant links would be nice. If you turn out to be right, I withdraw my bullshit call, but otherwise it stands. I don't recall ever reading anything like this.
Re:Public Perception (Score:2, Insightful)
Think back 1000 years ago. Think about the kinds of technical issues that people worried about back then. How far you can ride a camel. How to make a strong sword. How to make strong rock walls. All of these issues, which probably seemed pretty important back then, are completely meaningless now, because technology has advanced well beyond them.
Why do we assume that 1000 years from now, technology will still be similar? Nobody can predict the advances we will make in 50 years, yet people are confident that we wont have a solution for nuclear waste in 1000 years.
On top of that, current nuclear waste repositories are certified to last for something like 10,000 years, and expected to last for 100,000 years. Those orders of magnitude make the "issue" meaningless.
Not to mention the fact that your average coal burning plant simply doesn't have the potential to cause a catastrophe on the scale of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, etc
Chernobyl, yes. Three Mile Island no. I have never done the numbers, but I would be willing to bet that if you had a picnic next to the Three Mile Island Reactor, you would have received less radiation than if you had flown to Denver for the day. Ironically, Three Mile Island is one of the best arguments for the safety of nuclear power. Everything that could go wrong did, and yet there was no damage to the environment or people around it. This is what we are supposed to be afraid of?
Re:Two Words (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not so much the reactors that scare me, it's what do we do with the shit they create? With coal, we get pollution and global warming. With nuclera, nobody really seems to know what the fuck to do with the stuff.
But you are right, any problems at Hanford stem from making nuclear bombs, not from nuclear power. Nulcear power is safer, but I think a lot of that is because it's so new, and because the ramifications of failure are so significant. Honestly I'm not convinced there's enough data to really tell, statistically, if nuclear power is safe. Kinda like how the Concorde went from the safest plane to by far the most unsafe after just one crash.
I dunno, maybe nuclear is the best. No more dams, no more air pollution. It's really jsut the waste that worries me.
Get the French to launch it (Score:2, Insightful)
What stops the glass melting? (Score:3, Insightful)
On the other hand, hydrogen doesn't strike me as particularly absorbent. I thought it was mostly transparent except for a few frequencies (the hydrogen bands). As the gas reactor is acting as a purely blackbody radiator it's going to emit in a classical SB distribution, which will mean that most photons are going to just bounce around until they get absorbed by the mirror or glass.
So the obvious problem to me (and let's face it, I'm not a rocket scientist..) is that you have an 'impedance mismatch' between your energy source and your energy sink.
BUNKUM! (Score:2, Insightful)
Then he talks about "deltaV" by which he means that in space it costs energy to change your speed rather than maintain your speed. He completely neglects the fact that the biggest limit on acceleration is going to be how much "g force" the human body can tolerate for extended periods, rather than how much fuel or how powerful the rocket/engine is.
He also talks about bringing a large asteroid into earth's orbit for mining. maybe this is feasible, but this would a) alter the moon's relationship to the earth's orbit (question: are 3 body systems as stable as 2 body systems) and b) completely discounts the risk of the asteroid falling to earth, potentially destroying a swathe of the population!
Just like he completely neglects the risk of a large quantity of radioactive material being released into the earth's atmosphere in the case of an accident. He claims that although one of his engines would use the same amount of radioactive material as chinobyl, but 1% of the amount of material as the "ivy mike" nuclear test, then there would not be a problem with radioactive material being released into the atmosphere.
TO THIS DAY, radioactive materials from chernobyl can be detected in sheep which are farmed on hills in Wales. I don't see why this wouldn't be true about other parts of (northern) europe. He is incredibly myopic if he thinks that nuclear space disasters are an acceptable risk.
I could go on, but I shall leave it at this: the author is guilty of wishful thinking, he conveniently ignores major showstoppers, and I can only describe him as a complete buffoon.
God his stupidity makes me angry.
Re:Two Words (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly. Let's look at the facts, shall we? Chernoby was (is) old Soviet-desgn reactor. Those reactors do have a risk of catastrophic failure (like Chernobyl) it can NOT happen in moder western-type reactors (had similar thing happen in a western reactor that happened in Chernobyl, the reactor would shut down. No fire, no explosion, the reactor would shut down). Also, the technicians in Chernobyl basically did everything they could in order to blow the thing up. They removed the control-rods, they accelerated the reaction etc. etc. They did everything they were NOT supped to do!
Only thing that Chernobyl proved was that yes, if you design a reactor in some certain way, and yes, if you try REALLY HARD, you might be able to cause a disaster. No, that does not mean that all nuclear reactor are dangerous, far far from it!