NASA's space nuclear power program is a hot mess If you've ever wondered why NASA's recent space missions haven't made more aggressive use of nuclear power, the Space Administration's Office of the Inspector General issued a report this week that may have your answer. The decade-long project to develop better nuclear space systems is, to put it lightly, a bit of a mess. The …
They do, and have landed on Mars quite recently.
They're quite small. 5kg of PuO2 is less than half a litre in volume - about 420cc
It's relatively simple to make a small box that you can whack extremely hard then drop from a great height into the sea without excessive damage.
They use the Plutonium 238 isotope. There are some stocks but
The United States stopped producing bulk 238Pu with the closure of the Savannah River Site reactors in 1988. Since 1993, all of the 238Pu used in American spacecraft has been purchased from Russia. In total, 16.5 kilograms (36 lb) have been purchased, but Russia is no longer producing 238Pu, and their own supply is reportedly running low
I thought the UK had quite a lot of plutonium lying around somewhere. Though all(? I think) Magnox reactors have shut down, there's still a few AGRs running which could conceivably be used to make interesting things. Russia still has its fleet of RBMKs though from what I've heard they were never used for that purpose, the now decommissioned ACE reactors being used for that role.
Reactors that haven't been started up yet are actually not that hazardous -- the uranium fuel is not all that radioactive compared to the fission products you get later. The problem with space-borne reactors is mostly just that they're complex and have moving parts that can cause mission failures. Plutonium decay generators have none. Packaging the plutonium so it won't get dispersed in an accident is mostly a solved problem as I understand it; it's about using cladding that can survive re-entry heat.
...to cite the next time a solar powered project fails due to lack of power, whether that's dust, shadow, orientation or whatever else.
It's easy to advocate an RTG when you're not the one holding the purse strings, trying to source material or integrate them into a project. These are long standing issues and not easily overcome. Sure you can set up some research reactor to produce scientific quantities of an isotope, but for bulk quantities you really need commercial power stations to do the job at scale.
The likes of Magnox (here in the UK) are mostly history now, because of both economic and proliferation concerns.
NASA tends to have an allergy to the security necessary for this kind of project. The disconnect with the DOE is evidence of this. For half a billion dollars, they should have been able to come up with something. Maybe the should have let the Navy run it, as they already have a nuclear power proof.
A research project like this needs serious hands on technical management. This appears to have been run like a postdoc program. It appears there were few if any milestones or deliverables.
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