NASA Restarts Plutonium Production 139
Celarent Darii writes "In what looks like good news for the American Space program, NASA has restarted production of plutonium. According to the article, after the closure of Savannah Rivers reactor NASA purchased plutonium from Russia, but since 2010 this was no longer possible. The native production of plutonium is a step forward for the space program to achieve the energy density for long term space exploration."
As Seen On TV (Score:3)
Maybe if NASA is really good Santa will bring them some plutonium.
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Maybe if NASA is really good Santa will bring them some plutonium.
Good? They cut down Pluto until it was a dwarf, and now are making this 'plutonium' which I can only assume is made from Pluto's corpse...
They'll be getting coal, indeed. Or something to power an RTG. One of the two.
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I don't think he's even seen another human being...
Re:As Seen On TV (Score:5, Funny)
Because they demoted Pluto, NASA only gets dwarfium now.
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No. Goofy is the dog.
So was Pluto.
1.21 Jiggawatts (Score:1)
And if space exploration doesn't work out anymore we can always get into arms dealing.
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You mean if Congress cuts off funding for space exploration, you can always sell the Pu and use the profits to pay for the rockets...
I don't think there is much there in Ryan's budget for NASA
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sell it to north korea. the stuff that goes in RTGs will not work in a bomb.
Wrong plutonium (Score:3)
The isotope of PU used by NASA is not the type you make bombs from. I guess you could freak people out by spreading some radioactive material with a 'dirty bomb' - but basically, dirty bombs are a psychological weapon more than an actual hazard - they get people to panic and hurt themselves. They don't do much or any direct damage.
They type NASA uses won't fission (which is what you need for a nuclear mushroom-cloud, city destroying type explosion). It only decays, and as it decays, it produces a lot of hea
Re:1.21 Jiggawatts (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually non-fissile material can be used as a X-ray/gamma reflector [wikipedia.org], once thing get cooking good in the pit, the gama rays get reflected back to the secondary implode it and the excess neutrons which can transmute [wikipedia.org] some of the PU-238 into fissile PU-239, some of which is going to fission.
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Oh no! With 'worthless for weapons' Pu238 and $100 of explosives someone has caused billion of dollars of damage.
The explosion would warrant news, and a response by the bomb squad. In a short time, the news would leak that there was plutonium in the explosion. At that point, the entire population of the city would panic and head out of town. At least several dozen would be killed (migrate a large city at a moment's notice and statistically deaths will occur)
All the people in that city know at this momen
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You have such an over active imagination it's equal parts cute, fascinating and scary, all at once.
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Rational fear mis-applied is bad enough, but as you point out, irrational fear trumps all - short-circuiting any useful brain response.
I've lived in places where black-widow spiders were common. Rational-fear folks would look at the spider, say "Nah, not one." and go on with what they were doing. Irrational-fear people would be screaming and running or screaming and jumping up and down, yelling "Kill it, kill it." Same goes for bees, wasps - although for those at risk for severe
I Think We All Know the Real Reason..... (Score:1)
It's so they can go back to 1955.
Re:I Think We All Know the Real Reason..... (Score:5, Funny)
Nonsense. NASA wouldn't want to go backwards now, not when they're on the verge of building their very own rocket that can take men into space!
If not at the Savannah River Site, then where? (Score:5, Informative)
My first thought upon reading the summary was that if the Savannah River Site is closed, where are they making the new plutonium?
The answer, according to TFA, is the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
now wait for the anti-nuke crowd to complain... (Score:2, Troll)
I'm sure they'll say if solar isn't good enough, we should use (solar) wind power :P
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What they are not telling us, is the government knows the sun will go out soon. So we need non-solar based energy.
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Can you tack in a solar wind?
Without ripping your sail?
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Yes, you do it by taking advantage of gravity.
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That's not actually tacking, or sailing.
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Using a solar sail is certainly sailing. You use light pressure instead of air pressure, and the construction of the sail is different as a result, but it is certainly sailing. And sailing into the direction that the light originates is tacking and can be done with a solar sail together with gravity. What's your problem with it?
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Did you follow your own thread here?
Using gravity is not tacking or sailing was my comment.
Not sure how you got confused.
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IIRC you can tack against light but not solar wind. Light reflects, solar wind sticks.
I wonder (Score:5, Funny)
if Iran will impose sanctions on the United States...
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Iran should feel free to. The US economy wouldnt even blink. In fact, Iran needs the US and other advanced manufacturing economies for the high strength materials needed for its missile and nuclear material enrichment programs.
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if Iran will impose sanctions on the United States...
Perhaps Iran can sell Plutonium to NASA.
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if Iran will impose sanctions on the United States...
Perhaps Iran can sell Plutonium to NASA.
Let the free market sort it out. Whose business is it where NASA gets its raw materials from?
UK Plutonium (Score:5, Informative)
Am I wrong in thinking the UK has a plutonium stockpile it really doesn't know what to do with? Simply not juicy enough?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21505271 [bbc.co.uk]
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Different isotope of plutonium.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-238 - Fun stuff for space travel.
UK has a supply of a few different isotopes mixed together. Much less useful.
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Keep in mind all the carbon expelled to produce foods especially foods that make us fat.
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I have a vision! The liposuction power plant! "Do you need to lose a few pounds? Is your electric bill out of control? Come down to Lipo-Electric, where we will suck out those pesky hard-to-lose pounds. We'll even pay you, in the form of electric credits! Lipo-Electric is not responsible for any missing family members."
Re:UK Plutonium (Score:5, Informative)
It's the wrong isotope - bombs and reactors use Pu-239, while RTGs use Pu-238. The key difference is half-life and thus the heat generated, as the heat drives the thermocouples in the RTG to produce power. Pu-239 has a half life of 24 kyears, which means it decays slowly and thus doesn't produce much heat (relatively speaking). Pu-238 has a half life of 87 years, which means it emits considerable heat.
That short half life is also why NASA has been trying to figure out how to re-start production for some years now, since production was halted in 1988 a considerable quantity of the stockpiled fuel has essentially 'evaporated'. (And the stockpile wasn't that large to begin with.) Since the 'evaporated' fuel doesn't actually physically go anywhere, this means that you either have to use a bigger and heavier RTG or redesign the mission to use less power. (The first is obviously bad, and the second can paint you into a bit of a corner if the launch is delayed.) Processing the fuel to remove the decay products and restore energy density is... Very Expensive, so it's not an option (especially since it doesn't solve the problem of 'evaporation').
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It's the wrong isotope - bombs use Pu-239, while RTGs use Pu-238.
There, fixed that for you. Reactors will readily burn Pu-239. They will also burn Pu-240, and Pul-238 and whatever other isotope. To fetch "usable" Pu from a reactor requires lots of effort, but to use it, not so much. You can just mix it with initial fuel and be done with it.
Only bombs use Pu-239 only. And it takes nasty, expensive processing (and lots of it) to fetch Pu-239 and avoiding Pu-240. It is one of the reasons for those leaks at Hanford. Pu-240 contamination makes Pu nukes go "fuzz fuzz", like No
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Isn't that like saying that you can turn lead into gold by just taking out a few electrons?
Slashdot, news for nerds, alchemy that matters.
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Isn't that like saying that you can turn lead into gold by just taking out a few electrons?
Slashdot, news for nerds, alchemy that matters.
Damn! I'm sitting on mod points, but have already posted! Double plus good!
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When will you finally.... (Score:5, Funny)
.... make up your mind?
You used to produce Plutonium and you saw it was good. But then man got greedy and raced upward to the skies and eat from the forbidden fruit. And complicated-gdp-involving-economy-formula was not happy and it convinced you that it was bad. And Plutonium was no more, Savannah Rivers dropped the Rivers and became a p0rn5tar and the fallen from grace NASA purchased plutonium from Russia. Now there is what looks like good news, the saviour will be born, the native plutonium-producer child of NASA. A step forward for the space program to achieve the energy density for long space exploration. After a jump backward, sort of.
I wish we just got rid of the jumps backward.
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Why do this when... (Score:2)
We can just start reprocessing existing spent fuel and recover the material we need from that?
We will actually kill multiple birds with this... First, you get the material you wanted. Second, you don't create any new nuclear waste in the process, though it will change forms some and get somewhat smaller. Third, you can create new fuel assemblies and actually use the remaining fuel that is just sitting in pools of water right now. Not to mention that it will actually do something about the used fuel asse
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Re:Why do this when... (Score:5, Informative)
Commercial reactor waste has very little weapons-grade material in it, because in order to maximize production of weapons-grade Plutonium, you have to use a commercially inefficient fuel cycle to minimize the amount of spontaneously fissioning Plutonium isotopes being created through continued neutrox flux.
More succinctly: the more time U238 spends being bombarded in a reactor (thus, the more energy you create from the same fuel assembly), the more likely it is going to pass the "sweet spot" of Pu-239 into the undesireable Pu-240 or Pu-241 which poisons a prompt supercriticality which is created during a nuclear detonation. The reactors at Hanford that made the vast majority of weapons-bound Plutonium for the US weapons stockpile used somewhere around 6-month fuel cycles, where the average commercial reactor uses the fuel assembly for several years.
Re:Why do this when... (Score:5, Informative)
The Pu in the fuel rods is not the right isotope, it is almost all Pu239 (U238 + neutron = Pu239, [after a stage as Np239]). NASA needs Pu238. What Pu239 is in there would be a real bear to separate from the Pu239 (more difficult than the separation of U235 from U238 because the mass difference is less).
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Correcting myself (again), to be more accurate. As MachineShedFred pointed out above, there is also a significant amount of Pu240 in used nuclear fuel rods, which doesn't help NASA any with their Pu238 requirement, either.
Re:Why do this when..., not the right Pu (Score:2)
repost to correct typo:
The Pu in the fuel rods is not the right isotope, it is almost all Pu239 (U238 + neutron = Pu239, [after a stage as Np239]). NASA needs Pu238. What Pu238 is in there would be a real bear to separate from the Pu239 (more difficult than the separation of U235 from U238 because the mass difference is less).
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We can just start reprocessing existing spent fuel and recover the material we need from that?
We can't. The path to Pu-238 (the isotope used in RTGs) is Np-237 -(n)-> Np-238 -(beta-decay)-> Pu-238. Np-237 is a byproduct of neutron irradiation of U-238, but it must be separated and fabricated into target pins before further irradiation, otherwise your Pu-238 will be drowned in a mass of Pu-239 and higher isotopes, and there is no practical way to separate it. (Separating U-235 from U-238, three atomic units of difference, is difficult enough; Pu-238 and Pu-239 are a single atomic unit apart.)
Re:Why do this when... (Score:5, Funny)
/ducks
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Oblig BTTF quote (Score:1)
Libyans (Score:2)
If Pluto is no longer a planet... (Score:1, Funny)
is Plutonium still considered an atom?
Plutonium 238 (Score:5, Informative)
Let's hope they learned their lesson (Score:4, Insightful)
We didn't stop producing plutonium just because it wasn't economically feasible (when did that stop the government from doing anything) -- the history of plutonium in the United States has been littered with accidents and costly, multi-decade cleanup projects that cost billions of dollars. See Rocky Flats, [wikipedia.org] et al.
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We didn't stop producing plutonium just because it wasn't economically feasible (when did that stop the government from doing anything) -- the history of plutonium in the United States has been littered with accidents and costly, multi-decade cleanup projects that cost billions of dollars. See Rocky Flats, [wikipedia.org] et al.
If it's any consolation, we have what not to do down pat.
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NASA set us up the bomb! (Score:1)
Sorry, just had to get that out of my system.
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Don't correct your UID elders, boy!
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Now get off my lawn!
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A little too late for my tastes.
Meanwhile it's a waste product of a LFTR reactor. (Score:2)
https://www.google.ca/search?q=lftr+Plutonium-238 [google.ca]
But US laws exists to prevent developing the technology created in the 70s in the US.
down to 3 or 4 RTGs (Score:2)
Plus the cost at $4M a kilo was becoming significant.
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What is an RTG? (Score:2)
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It's a more polite way to say Read The f***ing Google.
No, NASA didn't produce it. (Score:2)
NASA didn't produce plutonium. DoE's Oak Ridge, TN facility did. NASA just issued the press release. NASA is good at that.
Coincidence? (Score:2)
So first we hear about funding problems [slashdot.org] at NASA.
Now we hear about NASA producing plutonium. So how are they planning on funding this plutonium operation? Hopefully it isn't by selling it on the internet*** to raise money ;^)
** Yes, you can actually buy radioactive isotopes on the internet. For example, from these guys here [unitednuclear.com]. Of course these guys don't sell plutonium, so NASA would be able to have a monopoly on that ;^)
Any News From Iran? (Score:2)
Re:Dehabitation (Score:4, Informative)
RTGs are designed to survive both the explosion and an uncontrolled impact with the ground.
Even if ruptured by the impact, plutonium is an immensely dense material - it's not easily scattered.
Re:Dehabitation (Score:5, Informative)
it scatters in smoke just fine. look up "windscale fire"
Re:Dehabitation (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Dehabitation (Score:5, Informative)
you need more information. the pu-238 used in RTGs is in oxide form, bound with Oxygen 16 to absorb the occasional neutron (it is mostly an alpha emitter) that can be formed. So, the pu-238 is "already burned", in a sense, and in a form to be safer to humans.
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ingesting in a form your body will retain (say metallic or salt) is dangerous. but a glass or ceramic won't be kept.
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Well, that is disappointing.
Re:Dehabitation (Score:5, Informative)
The wiki article on that fire notes that it released large amounts of iodine-131. The fire was caused by attempting to produce plutonium, not by burning plutonium and the reports on its cause seem to be either uranium and magnesium/lithium cartridges.
Plutonium dioxide is already oxidized. It's chemically impossible for it to catch fire, and again, dense and heavy with a high melting point.
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Never underestimate the power of chemistry to make unintentionally broad [youtube.com] statements concerning lack of ability to catch fire look silly. You assume burning in air. Chemists merely look for a stronger oxidizer. Muahahaha....
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Never underestimate the power of chemistry to make unintentionally broad [youtube.com] statements concerning lack of ability to catch fire look silly. You assume burning in air. Chemists merely look for a stronger oxidizer. Muahahaha....
Are rockets launched with thousands of kilos of fluorine-based oxidizer?
I'm assuming we're talking about a rocket launch failure of a plutonium-dioxide based RTG. These devices have a long history of safe operation by now, with the most extreme test being the lunar lander splashdown after Apollo 13 where the RTG survived the crash intact. Prior to that there have been several instances of rupture, but provided they remain rare, the risks posed these uncommon events are still low.
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Hi, this is the parent of this particular topic parent which I started replying too:
If the vehicle burns up on launch or explodes at a low altitude there goes the county, launch facility, what have you.
If it burn up in the upper atmosphere perhaps world wide cancer rates double or there goes any thing where the jet stream stears the fallout event for the next 6 months or so. So just saying... great for the space program though... parse... parse... ; )
See how we're talking about rockets there? See how the general article is talking about plutonium for RTG use.
Now all those things being apparent, can you perhaps see how a discussion on a very complex scenario where we intentionally try to make plutonium oxide burn is irrelevant - except - as I pointed out - if a rocket was actually using thousands of kilos of fluorine-based propellant. Which, as your link points out, they
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Happy hear that nobody uses hydrazine [wikipedia.org] as a propellant due to toxicity and environmental devastation either.
The post that you replied to in your actual overbroad post:
Re:Dehabitation (Score:4, Interesting)
Ok. Let's deal with overbroad:
We live in an oxygen rich environment. There is oxygen everywhere. When something is left out in the open, it slowly oxidizes to some form of oxide.
Unless you have exceptionally specific, extreme circumstances, this means something which is at it's maximum oxidation state will not burn.
We do not live in a fluorine permeated atmosphere. We don't have accidental piles of trifluorochlorine lying around. Commercial rockets themselves are not run on reactive fluorine fuels. The failure mode of a rocket launching would be to combust in an oxygen atmosphere with liquid oxygen and kerosene fuels, or the aluminum-based solid oxide fuel.
So again: it's not "comically overbroad", you're being pedantic. Because fluorine and specifically trifluorochlorine is literally the only way that a maximally oxidized metal compound is going to "burn".
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Aluminum-based solid oxide fuel is also a mis-type, it should be ammonium perchlorate (which has aluminum in it I think - IANARS). Got mixed up in thinking about oxides solid-oxide fuel cells :)
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Well, I did just that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire [wikipedia.org]
Seems like plenty of nasty stuff escapted, but no plutonium...
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Of course this means nothing to the anti-nuke crowd, like Helen Caldicott. I used to hang out with quite a few of them back in the '80s, and their agenda (most of the ones that I knew anyway) isn't really as much anti-nuclear as anti-technology. Luddites of the worst order.
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Re:Dehabitation (Score:5, Informative)
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Hundreds. HL is 87 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-238 [wikipedia.org]
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Hundreds. HL is 87 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-238 [wikipedia.org]
So, only half as dangerous after 87 years?
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Uh, no. I said hundreds. Implying several half lives.
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Stupid thorium.
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Apollo 13's lunar module was carrying an RTG; it burned up over the Pacific. The RTG's container is still intact at the bottom of the Tonga Trench and is expected to remain so for at least ten half-lives. This was in 1970.
I think we'll be okay.
Hell, when one of the Transit sattelites failed to achieve orbit and burned up over Madagascar, it was using an early RTG design that didn't have adequate shielding; worldwide cancer rates didn't double.
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Wait, so you don't see any difference between a government lead by a bunch of religious extremists who put dogma before facts, human welfare and compassion, and. . . Iran? Wait. . . maybe the US shouldn't have nukes. . .
No Plutonium is pretty useful. (Score:5, Informative)
1g of Pu-238 produces .5 watts, which is really useful for long-lasting portable devices. There are some early pacemakers running from Pu-238 that are still operational.
For example, a few grams of Pu-238 could power an iPhone for a century without ever recharging...
(but would cost tens of thousands of dollars..)
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