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The US Department of Energy announced that 50 grams of Plutonium-238 had been made by researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn. This is the first time the substance has been made in the country since the Savannah River Plant in South Carolina stopped making it in the late 1980s.
"Right now, NASA only has access to 35 kilograms, about 77 pounds, of Pu-238 to power space exploration missions. That's just enough to last into the middle 2020s, powering just two or three proposed missions."
"Two years ago, NASA began funding efforts to make Pu-238 again in ernest. The agency has put about $15 million each year toward the DOE's Office of Nuclear Energy's efforts." The next step is to automate and scale up the process.
I didn't know we had lost the capability to produce it and am glad we are starting up again. So how much Pu-238 could we make for the cost of one F-35?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 25 2015, @03:10PM
didn't know we had lost the capability to produce it
Heresy. You didn't know we had to buy our radioactive material for Curiosity rover from Russia?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 25 2015, @03:55PM
I didn't know the Curiosity rover came from Russia!
(Score: 4, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Friday December 25 2015, @04:04PM
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_luciferproject06.htm [bibliotecapleyades.net]
There is a theory that mankind created that huge-assed storm on Jupiter, when we dropped some fissionables into the atmosphere. Just something to think about . . .
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 25 2015, @04:31PM
There's quite a lot of bullshitty ideas on the internet ... ;-)
But thanks anyway for mentioning it. I hadn't heard of *that* one yet and it's much more hilarious than most of the others :-D
Were I not an anonymous coward, you'd get a +1 informative from me.
(Score: 2) by snufu on Friday December 25 2015, @05:53PM
Can't we just use illudium Pu-36 for our explosive space modulators?
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday December 25 2015, @10:40PM
And be plagued with space rabbits?!? Are you nuts?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 25 2015, @06:03PM
i really hope that one day a fantastic interstellar travel engine technology is found and tested only to fail over and over and
over again until some sn0t nose figures out that the space-time continuum in our star system has been contaminted too
much for the drive to work and that we have to use plain-old chemical rockets to clean up the
neighborhood before we can actually use the drive to go to other star systems ^_^
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 25 2015, @10:38PM
"We know everything"? Except, perhaps, about the Dunning-Kruger effect [wikipedia.org].