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Oak Ridge National Laboratory Increases Plutonium Production for Eventual Use in Space Missions

posted by Fnord666 on Monday January 14 2019, @02:06PM   
from the glowing-idea dept.

takyon writes:

NASA's deep-space nuclear-power crisis may soon end, thanks to a clever new robot in Tennessee

The US government says a new robot is poised to help it create a reliable, long-term supply chain of plutonium-238 (Pu-238): a radioactive material NASA requires to explore deep space.

NASA uses Pu-238 to power its most epic space missions— among them New Horizons (now beyond Pluto), the Voyagers (now in interstellar space), and Cassini (now part of Saturn).

[...] NASA tried to address the shrinking of its supply in the 1990s, but the agency and its partners didn't secure funding to create a new pipeline for Pu-238 until 2012. That work, which gets about $20 million in funding per year, is finally starting to move from the research phase toward full-scale production. By 2025, the Department of Energy hopes to meet the NASA-mandated need of 3.3 pounds (1,500 grams) per year.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is located in Tennessee and leading the work, says it recently proved there is a way to produce eight times as much Pu-238 as it made just a couple of years ago, thanks to a new automated robot. [...] This week, the lab said in a press release that it's ready to push annual production to more than 14 ounces (400 grams) per year, an eight-fold increase.

Cassini carried 33 kilograms of plutonium. New Horizons had 9,750 grams (lower than the 10,900 grams, 1/3 of the Cassini amount, called for in the original design).

It's time to send a probe to Uranus and Neptune already.

Previously: US Resumes Making Pu-238 after Decades Long Hiatus
NASA Unlikely to Have Enough Plutonium-238 for Missions by the Mid-2020s

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Original Submission

• Re:oh, good(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday January 15 2019, @11:38AM

  by takyon (881) <{takyon} {at} {soylentnews.org}> on Tuesday January 15 2019, @11:38AM (#786856) Journal

  Your new figure is just as false as the 1 gram assertion.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassini%E2%80%93Huygens#Plutonium_power_source [wikipedia.org]

  Had there been any malfunction causing the probe to collide with the Earth, NASA's complete environmental impact study estimated that, in the worst case (with an acute angle of entry in which Cassini would gradually burn up), a significant fraction of the 33 kg of plutonium-238 inside the RTGs would have been dispersed into the Earth's atmosphere so that up to five billion people (i.e. almost the entire terrestrial population) could have been exposed, causing up to an estimated 5,000 additional cancer deaths over the subsequent decades (0.0005 per cent, i.e. a fraction 0.000005, of a billion cancer deaths expected anyway from other causes; the product is incorrectly calculated elsewhere as 500,000 deaths). However, the chance of this happening were estimated to be less than one in one million.

  33 kg (73 lbs) spreads across the whole planet, and you get an utterly unnoticeable jump in cancer deaths. If a similar-sized RTG were to blow up in the 2030s, we could probably find a cure for most cancers before most of those people died.

  Maybe you were thinking of some other isotope? The one used in RTGs is plutonium-238.

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  [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]

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