NASA's Plutonium Supply Dwindling; ESA To Help 173
Posted
by
timothy
from the fire-up-x10-and-k25-again dept.
from the fire-up-x10-and-k25-again dept.
astroengine writes "NASA's stockpile of the plutonium isotope Pu-238 is at a critical level, causing concern that there won't be enough fuel for future deep space missions. Pellets of Pu-238 are used inside radioisotope thermoelectric generators (or RTGs) to generate electricity for space probes traveling beyond the orbit of Mars — solar energy is too weak for solar arrays at these distances. Blocked by a contract dispute with Russia to supply Pu-238 and the US Department of Energy that has not been granted funds to produce more of the isotope, NASA lacks enough of the radioisotope to fuel the future joint NASA-ESA mission to Europa. However, the head of the European Space Agency has announced that they have plans to commence a new nuclear energy program to alleviate the situation."
Missed Opportunity? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Recycle Nukes? (Score:3, Insightful)
And when I'm pretty sure companies are still willing to cash government checks... I guess I don't understand "shortages" in synthesized isotopes. I heard a while back there is another isotope synthesized in Canada that we have to buy because there isn't enough in the US or something like that. I don't get it.
There are several situations like that in the US. Sure, private companies could make synthesized isotopes. We have the brainpower and tools to do it. Unfortunately we have ming-numbingly huge government red tape that gets in the way. Fines, fees, inspections, reports, surveys, permits, clearences, investigations, and on and on and on. I mean--you don't really expect the government would just /let/ someone start manufacturing nuclear anything for any reason, do you?
Re:Missed Opportunity? (Score:3, Insightful)
The US was in on the industry, remember the entire Nuclear Weapon Complex the US had/has from Savannah River to Oak Ridge to Pantex to Rocky Flats to Los Alamos to Hanford?
Plutonium is a pain to produce, clean up and deal with.
Re:Maybe the Muslims will help us out... (Score:5, Insightful)
You have issues dude. I identify myself as Muslim and it's a creed, but science-wise "Muslims" (Middle East) have lost it (i.e. stop being mad about it).
Yes, Algebra and Algorithm are Arabic words traced to the amazing Mohammed Ibn Musa Al-Khawarizmi (who was "Persian" btw, yes, the people we intend to bomb), and f#@king YES, India was there first.
But that doesn't take from him (or his civilization/creed) the right to call the names.
(For the purposes of this post, I will interchange creed and civilization, even though they're far-far-FAR from being the same thing).
It's a phenomenon Neil Degrasse Tyson describes as "Naming Rights" (I'm no scholar, so maybe it has another name). But basically, when a nation/region excels and innovates, they get the right to name their discoveries and they effectively "own" them.
Why is the rest of the world using .hk, .uk and .whatever domains? Why is the US the only country that enjoys .gov, .mil and .edu without a trailing .us?
Because, this s$#t was invented here, and "we"* earned it.
Jupiter, Venus, Mars, Pluto.. all Greek mythology names, why? They were "it"** back in the day.
So, what happened to the Muslim world? Well, Al-Ghazali [wikipedia.org] decided to take them 300 years back into oblivion.
No scientist/mathematician/programmer/thinker/etc. would ever express prejudice. Empathy and sorrow for ignorance, maybe, but not hatred.
Now... where are we? We have racism (been to AZ lately?), prejudice (Muslim/Jew/*INSERT RELIGION* haters) and a whole lot more.
A lot of Americans do not believe in evolution or other scientifically proven facts. We kill our enemies for our "god-given" rights and we (the majority of us) want religion taught in school.
I wonder if GWB was our "Al-Ghazali", or maybe it will be Obama. Whomever it is, we must stop it and freaking move forward. Otherwise, we're fscked. We'll be the nation that our grandchildren and history talks about as "they invented XYZ, but muhahaha, look at them barbarians." And the elite nations at the time will nuke the ish out of them for being so backwards.
I want us to prevail, but with attitudes like yours and the extreme ignorance level the populace have, I'm afraid it's already too late.
I better start learning Chinese (Ni Hao) :(
And finally; to be on-topic; NASA needs to get some more of that "shiz-nit" :P
----
* I'm kind of one of you("us") now!
** A.K.A. The $h#t
Re:Recycle Nukes? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Recycle Nukes? (Score:5, Insightful)
Pardon my ignorance and possible first post - but couldn't NASA just recycle some retiring nuke warheads for plutonium?
Oh, yes, any moron in Slashdot is a rocket scientist.
No, they can't. Nukes have Pu-239 (the fissile isotope), and they need Pu-238 (the alpha emmiter).
Apparently actual Slashdot rocket scientists are also assholes.
- Not GP, but a rocket scientist who thought it was a reasonable question.
Reactors (Score:3, Insightful)
Shouldn't we be building breeder reactors that make Plutonium? It might help with global warming by retiring some caol fired power plants.
Re:Recycle Nukes? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's fucking plutonium. You can't just make it. Hippies freak shit when we try to build an oil refinery, much less refine nuclear material.
But for some reason they don't mind turning on the lights in their home with electricity provided by coal fired generators that put more radioactive particulates in the air than any nuclear plant could.
Re:Joint missions? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Recycle Nukes? (Score:1, Insightful)
It's fucking plutonium. You can't just make it. Hippies freak shit when we try to build an oil refinery, much less refine nuclear material.
But for some reason they don't mind turning on the lights in their home with electricity provided by coal fired generators that put more radioactive particulates in the air than any nuclear plant could.
Hippiecrits.
Re:Have you ever read "Foundation" by Asimov? (Score:3, Insightful)
I noticed the signs back in the 80's, I could see the US was near its peak and have been watching its slow glide down. Just like every "Great Nation" since earliest history, Aztec, Inca, Greek, Nubia, Mesopotamia, Babylon, etc., etc..
Re:NASA had another option in 1981 (Score:4, Insightful)
Good point, but considering that the electronics are alerady radiation hardened against gamma ray, alpha particles and cosmic rays of much higher power I would really be surprised if much extra shielding would be needed.
That depends on how much the RPG contributes to the radiation environment of the spacecraft. Keep in mind that it is a nearby source that will be irradiating the rest of the spacecraft for the life of the mission.
Re:Maybe the Muslims will help us out... (Score:5, Insightful)
Thanks! and I whole-heatedly agree with you!
I recently watched The Unthinkable [netflix.com] (if you haven't watched it, it's a great movie), and as to not spoil it for anyone, all I can say is that I was sitting at the edge of my seat and rooting for Samuel Jackson throughout the movie.
Bin Laden is an a$$hole, and the 72 virgins (myth) will be well-hung top-men scavenging his and his goons' cavities while slow-roasting them to perfection (yes I hate them as much as you do, probably even more so).
The stories that have been hitting Slashdot about censorship in Pakistan and other Islamic countries gathered quite a few "look at them backwards Muslims", instead of generating empathy about the sad state of these countries.
I should know, I lived in a couple of them growing up. People are afraid for their lives and cannot speak up. People can't discuss politics in coffee shops, because that guy smoking hooka is new and he might be from internal affairs, and if he marks you, your family won't even know what happened to you (Egyptian NSA-equivalent calls it "sending someone behind the sun").
America used to be the great nation everyone there talked about. It was wonderland, where you can criticize leaders and "be alive the next day". Where your creed and background did not matter, only what you knew and what you can do.
But somehow when we started meddling with their affairs, we became the villain. There's an Arabic saying that goes something like "Me and my brother would fight my cousin if he does us wrong, but if a stranger comes in, my cousin and I will team up".
The solution is _not_ to go into these countries with military force to "spread freedom", the solution is to stand up against tyranny with words, show them an example of democracy over here and not to co-operate with their regimes to oppress people.
Final words: Any kind of zealotry (religious/nationalistic/software) is ignorant, and I hope that I see a world without hatred before my time is up here. I doubt it, but I'm still an optimist inside and one can dream.
Fast breeder plutonium reactors = sick joke (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know why NASA doesn't just buy some left over stuff from the UK, France, South Africa, Israel, Egypt, half of Eastern Europe or as part of a non proliforation deal - North Korea.
There is a lot of plutonium of various isotopes out there. It's only the politics of pretending there isn't that get in the way of NASA getting some (plus stupid counterproductive sabre rattling in the direction of Russia - the cold war is over guys!).
Civilian vs. Military demand for RTGs (Score:4, Insightful)
The US has been using up its existing stockpiles of Pu-238 to build RTGs for a mixture of civilian deep space projects and black intel operations such as non-solar-powered stealth spy satellites and seabed-emplaced submarine monitoring stations. The Russians agreed to sell the US some Pu-238 under a licence that prevented it being used for military functions but they shut that down when it became obvious the US was reallocating most if not all of its home-grown stockpile to the military side of things. Like oil Pu-238 is fungible and the Russian supply of Pu-238 was effectively enhancing US military capabilities.
No big deal... (Score:3, Insightful)
...you don't need Plutonium to make Muslims feel good about themselves, right?
I mean, since this is possibly NASA's FOREMOST mission: ... and math and engineering,"
"When I became the NASA administrator -- or before I became the NASA administrator -- (Obama) charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science
Re:Maybe the Muslims will help us out... (Score:4, Insightful)
Empathy? According to prevailing beliefs (held by all but ignorant red-staters), the state of those countries is what the people of those countries want, and for Americans to feel that this is wrong is to be disrespectful of Islamic culture.
That assumes
1) The people can listen
2) The people will listen
3) The people will believe what we say, despite all the propaganda (much of it coming from the US itself...) painting the US as the root of all evil
4) The people, other than those at the top, matter at all.
I don't have a solution. If there was some sort of home-grown pro-freedom movement, the best the US could do is oppose it. But as far as I can tell (from 10,000+ miles away...) there isn't; the people want their chains. Not surprising; there's a lot of people in the US who want them too.
Re:Maybe the Muslims will help us out... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Recycle Nukes? (Score:3, Insightful)
To produce Pu-238 you produce a ton of weapons grade plutonium, do we really need more of that crap churned out?
In a word, yes.
The US is the only major nuclear power which can't produce new plutonium pits for nuclear weapons. Further, the breeder reactors that produce plutonium could also recycle spent fuel from conventional plants into new, useful fuel.
At some point sanity will prevail and we'll vastly expand our use of nuclear energy for both power generation and space travel. At the moment though, we're stuck in enviro-Luddite hell.
This November may mark a turning point towards rationality on a lot of levels.
Re:None of that is plutonium is it? (Score:4, Insightful)
New plutonium? Please also note that EBR-II is a late 1950's design that went live in 1965 and ACTUALLY RAN ON URANIUM.
If you are going to try to correct people please learn about your subject matter.
Liquid sodium reactors are a dead end technology until somebody solves the problem of liquid metal embrittlement in areas with a lot of voiding from neutron damage. If you have an answer to that, then sure go ahead and push that wheelbarrow - but for everyone else the lessons from the 1970s were very clear that it's either a roadblock to overcome before any more reactors of that type are built or a dead end.
I really wish nuclear advocates would learn about the new and interesting stuff instead of the dreams of the 1950s.
Re:Recycle Nukes? (Score:3, Insightful)
The coal plants are far away, like the coal which powers them. Coal-fired power plants have no place in the popular imagination (any more), so public awareness is low.
They don't bother the hippies any more than mountaintop removal mining, which only displaces Red State hicks they despise anyway.