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posted by Fnord666 on Monday January 29 2018, @04:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the next-time-go-for-megapower dept.

Initial tests of NASA's Kilopower nuclear power system have been successful, and full-power testing will be done in March. Each Kilopower unit is expected to provide between 1 kW to 10 kW of electric power:

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. "Mars is a very difficult environment for power systems, with less sunlight than Earth or the moon, very cold nighttime temperatures, very interesting dust storms that can last weeks and months that engulf the entire planet," said Steve Jurczyk, associate administrator of NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate. "So Kilopower's compact size and robustness allows us to deliver multiple units on a single lander to the surface that provides tens of kilowatts of power," Jurczyk added.

[...] Lee Mason, NASA's principal technologist for power and energy storage, said Mars has been the project's main focus, noting that a human mission likely would require 40 to 50 kilowatts of power. 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.

NASA's next Mars mission is InSight, a stationary lander scheduled to launch in May. It will use two MegaFlex solar arrays from Orbital ATK. NASA's Mars 2020 rover is scheduled to launch in July 2020. It will use 4.8 kg of plutonium dioxide to provide no more than 110 Watts of power.

The Juno mission is the first mission to Jupiter to use solar panels. Juno uses 72 square meters of solar panels to generate a maximum of just 486 Watts at Jupiter. Mars receives about 12 times more solar radiation per m2 than Jupiter. The New Horizons mission to Pluto and Cassini–Huygens mission to Saturn both used radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs). Cassini used three RTGs originally rated for 300 W each. A spare Cassini RTG was used for New Horizons, which provided 245.7 W at launch (~200 W by the Pluto encounter).

The Fission System Gateway to Abundant Power for Exploration

Also at NASA and Popular Science.

Previously: NASA's Kilopower Project Testing a Nuclear Stirling Engine


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  • (Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Tuesday January 30 2018, @03:59AM (12 children)

    by Aiwendil (531) on Tuesday January 30 2018, @03:59AM (#630171) Journal

    So - it is ballparking it in the 20ktrange when fresh if used in a bomb (assuming little boy design, it probably are a lot better today). still less useful than what it would be if it was a low-enriched (19%) reactor.

    Considering that we are talking about an area of devastation about 5sq.mi/12sq.km (~2km radius) where concrete buildings are expected to start surviving at about 200m away from the blast and that most buildings today are of reinforced concrete, and the height of the buildings also will make airbursts a lot less efficient (radiation comes before shockwave, concrete is quite decent shielding), it is just a weird choice of weapon (unless one is relying on mass panic and overreacting politicians, in which case it still would be more effecient to just start orbital flechetting of nuclear reactors. if going for actual kills start targeting hydrodams)

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @06:26AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @06:26AM (#630212)

    For any sort of serious attacks it is both much cheaper and much easier to produce nerve gas or biological weapons.

    The amount of infrastructure you need to refine nuclear materials, plus all the secondary materials needed for neutron reflectors, shielding, etc, not including the machine equipment and centrifuges that would be irradiated over the course of processing/working the materials is significant. A state-based adversary would have no problems, but an organization without formal territory would find it difficult to succeed without being discovered and without wasting a significant amount of capital in easily trackable supplies, ignoring the ease with which radiation itself can be tracked.

    Biological and chemical weapons on the other hand, once placed in sealed and washed containers, optionally packed in a secondary container, are basically impossible to track outside of obviously baggy luggage or an x-ray scan of the container, and can trade off lab size for production quantity over time for the majority of chemicals/biological agents being released.

    Having said that: You must have noticed we have not had a single biological or chemical attack take place in any major country that was not state sponsored (usually domestic sponsorship/research, such as the Tuskagee experiments.)

    One might be curious to look into the *WHYS* of that, given all thee 'terrorists' who are so keen to ruin our ways of life (which they have been quite successful at btw, if you look at modern civil rights and 'legal' surveillance methods.)

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 30 2018, @08:14AM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 30 2018, @08:14AM (#630238) Journal

      For any sort of serious attacks it is both much cheaper and much easier to produce nerve gas or biological weapons.

      If you say so. They also tend to be much less effective. There's something to be said for a man portable weapon that can kill tens of thousands of people instantly. Chemical weapons just don't have that potential, unless you're distributing massive amounts of the poison (say dosing a city's entire subway system at once). Biological weapons have the potential, but obtaining and distributing them is far from easy (even if you have plenty of willing martyrs to spread the disease). And any disease lethal enough to outperform a small fission bomb is likely to be able to wipe out the researchers if even small mistakes are made.

      Having said that: You must have noticed we have not had a single biological or chemical attack take place in any major country that was not state sponsored (usually domestic sponsorship/research, such as the Tuskagee experiments.)

      Nerve gas [wikipedia.org] attack in Tokyo and Salmonella attack [wikipedia.org] in Oregon, US. Both were privately instigated. The anthrax attacks [wikipedia.org] in 2001 were probably private despite using a culture that had been preserved by the US government. Bunch of chemical attacks [johnstonsarchive.net] have happened in the Middle East in recent years that were non-state based, but not what I think you'd consider a major country (Iran and Afghanistan).

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 30 2018, @07:46AM (9 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 30 2018, @07:46AM (#630233) Journal

    it is just a weird choice of weapon

    After you described the devastation it can cause? It's a great terrorist weapon when you just want to kill a lot of people.

    • (Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Tuesday January 30 2018, @12:58PM (8 children)

      by Aiwendil (531) on Tuesday January 30 2018, @12:58PM (#630303) Journal

      If going from an orbital approach it isn't a good choice at all (as stated, you'd either need to sacrifice a lot or turn it into global skeet shooting day).

      It is a great terror-weapon in that people fail to understand it and the instant nature of it, but in terms of actually killing people it barely bats average - even if hitting a major city you'd probably not even reach a million dead (quite frankly even going less than 100k dead wouldn't be surprising) (unless the panic really gets out of hand or we include the following war), and then you're out of weapon.
      It also isn't really that great for devastation either, you basically just get a few blocks of wasteland and a lot of jobs for structural engineers to do inspections (do not underestimate just how good modern concrete is against blasts and radiation)

      However - if going for fear, panic, economic impact and such things there are a lot of better uses for the same material and people's radiophobia.

      ( https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hiroshima_aftermath.jpg#/media/File:Hiroshima_aftermath.jpg [wikimedia.org] is a quite illustrative example of the difference between wooden and concrete buildings in how they handle a nuclear strike (and firestorm), and that was WWII era concrete, for a blast about the yield we are talking about (most of the devastation is from fires). The building slightly left of center was ground zero (Shima Hospital if you want to look it up))

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 30 2018, @03:06PM (5 children)

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 30 2018, @03:06PM (#630385) Journal

        If going from an orbital approach

        Doesn't have to get to space in the first place. Someone might steal the stuff before launch.

        • (Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Tuesday January 30 2018, @03:53PM (4 children)

          by Aiwendil (531) on Tuesday January 30 2018, @03:53PM (#630409) Journal

          Someone might steal the stuff before launch.

          If really worried about it well, just mix in a solid neutron absorber and place it so that it can be removed with drilling (keep this pattern secret) as well as radioactive gasses. The gasses is to aid detection of any reworking of the material (if you have enough tech to completly hide the detection of that you have enough tech to enrich U-235 in secret anyway).

          Or just make sure that no place until last few minutes prior to launch are allowed to keep more than half a core, that will keep it below the mass needed (unless you have enough knowledge to need nowhere near that enrichment level) for a simple weapon.

          • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 30 2018, @04:37PM (3 children)

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 30 2018, @04:37PM (#630444) Journal

            If really worried about it well, just mix in a solid neutron absorber and place it so that it can be removed with drilling (keep this pattern secret) as well as radioactive gasses.

            And once someone steals it, removes the neutron absorber and radioactive gases, which would be less of a pain than stealing it in the first place, then...? Point is it's not going to be allowed on Earth. Too much costly and high publicity security drama associated with handling the stuff.

            • (Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Tuesday January 30 2018, @08:20PM (2 children)

              by Aiwendil (531) on Tuesday January 30 2018, @08:20PM (#630572) Journal

              How do you plan on removing the radioactive gases without setting off the monitoring systems around the globe? I'm curious since once that is set off normal mobile radiation monitoring equipment will be enough to pinpoint you well enough to send in forces.

              I agree on that the poltical circus will make this non-viable for civilian terrestrial use (outside of places already allowed to deal with this level of enrichment - since it basically is a downscaled core of a nuclear sub reactor [they play around in this level of enrichment]), just like _lots_ of other designs.

              • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 30 2018, @11:40PM (1 child)

                by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 30 2018, @11:40PM (#630712) Journal
                And what government official is going to assume that anyone willing to steal that much enriched uranium won't have a contingency for that (such as releasing said radioactive gas on multiple continents).
                • (Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Wednesday January 31 2018, @12:02PM

                  by Aiwendil (531) on Wednesday January 31 2018, @12:02PM (#630913) Journal

                  The point of the gas is that it is very likely to escape if the fuel is being reworked (since I wasn't explicit with it, the gas should be put _inside_ the fuel itself, ie, make the fuel in the radioactive gas mixture instead of in an air-mixture, also pack it when surrounded by the same gas).

                  If they manage to contain the gas well enough to not set off every detector on the way to release they probably know enough that this would be utterly pointless other than showing off, since just burying the container would be a lot better way of disposing of it.

                  So I'd guess that the gov't official that going to assume that is someone who spent one hour in a lecture about how radiological monitoring works ;)
                  (The level of containment needed to hold gas in to the degree needed is about the same as used to hide clandestrine chemical warfare labs (they use the same equipment - those two industries share a lot of safety gear), which would be a better choice of weapon)

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 30 2018, @04:53PM (1 child)

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 30 2018, @04:53PM (#630454) Journal

        It is a great terror-weapon in that people fail to understand it and the instant nature of it, but in terms of actually killing people it barely bats average - even if hitting a major city you'd probably not even reach a million dead (quite frankly even going less than 100k dead wouldn't be surprising) (unless the panic really gets out of hand or we include the following war), and then you're out of weapon. It also isn't really that great for devastation either, you basically just get a few blocks of wasteland and a lot of jobs for structural engineers to do inspections (do not underestimate just how good modern concrete is against blasts and radiation)

        You just typed all and still are trying to downplay the effectiveness of even a small atomic bomb? It's more damaging than that. You get complete destruction in that few block area; you probably will get a firestorm that will consume a larger area (and kill most people in that area); you get weeks of radioactive fallout and injury issues (people being evacuated, treated for radiation exposure and heat burns); and you get years of clean up drama. It's a very effective attack from the point of view of a would-be terrorist or someone tasked with trying to do something about said potential attack.

        • (Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Tuesday January 30 2018, @08:05PM

          by Aiwendil (531) on Tuesday January 30 2018, @08:05PM (#630563) Journal

          The effectiveness of a small atomic bomb against a modern city is quite low (compared to what people seem to expect), but I guess the issue is that I'm comparing it to the intial assumption (that is was launched from a spaceborne adversary) in which case it is an odd choice of weapon.

          You'd be unlikely to get a firestorm (albeit it is a possibility), but you'd get at least one heck of a conflagration.

          Radioactive fallout is a minor issue as long as people stick to bottled water (incl softdrinks) and stay indoors (exactly as you should do with chemical mishaps) until evac-people can get to them.

          Radiation exposure is a line of sight issue and given that the radiation is faster than the shockwave this means most stuff will be absorbed in the buildings (and higher buildings really cuts off angles from airbusts) - but I agree on that this is the main mode of killing (unless going for a sports-stadium during a game or similar).
          Heatburns (from primary source) is for all intent and purpose a radiation exposure (with it being actual radiation).

          The psychological impacts (evacuation and clean up) will be major unless the population have basic training/education for disasters and radiation - this I agree on.

          The main isssue with cleanup is that most people balk at doing it the fast way - which is identical with how you do cleanups from chemical mishaps (but for some reason polticians insist on getting in the way instead of letting the experts have free reins).

          And no, not trying to downplay it - rather just point out that a 20kt nuke is a much milder beast towards a modern city with modern capabitilies to render aid and response than what people would expect (and - excepting deathtoll due to higher population density - would be less than against either hiroshima and nagasaki due to better structures and hopefully better knowledge about how to react)