Let 'er rip.
Posted on 05/17/2016 6:19:08 PM PDT by Sawdring
The United States has begun manufacturing nuclear spacecraft fuel for the first time in a generation, but full production of the stuff is still seven years or so away.
In December, officials at the Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee announced that researchers at the site had generated a 1.8-ounce (50 grams) sample of plutonium-238, the fuel that powers deep-space missions such as NASA's New Horizons Pluto probe and Cassini Saturn orbiter.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
OUR TOP STORY TONIGHT:
“Colonizing new planets won’t happen for awhile”
50 years ago they could - and did - build reactors for producing the stuff from bare ground to operation in 7 months.
now we can pee in a bathroom of our own choosing
We could always use an Orion Drive.
I say we fire up the Omega 13.
The US has been buying the stuff from Russia.
In the article it says the US hasn’t received any since 2010.
It’s usually used in long range probes to the outer solar system like the Pluto Express and Cassini. So it is periodic.
Let 'er rip.
Are you cutting and pasting stuff out of the article?
No, I actually didn’t read it. LoL.
Plutonium also was likely used in the latest Mars rovers.
The article is talking about plutonium 238, which is used for radioisotope thermal generators -- its radioactive decay is such that a big enough lump of it glows red hot all the time. We've never had much of a capacity to produce the stuff, and bought a lot of what we used from the Russians.
Pu 238 is a fascinating isotope.
Fairly hard to produce but there is nothing like it.
88 year half-life so it sticks around long enough to get work done.
No serious gamma emissions to worry about killing everyone around it.
If you try and build a bomb out of it, it melts long before you get to critical mass.
Nuclear bombs. I remeber reading about this in the late 70s early 80s in Omni.
We coud have had some long range probes of our solar system sooner if we had used the Orion drive or even the ion thrust drive back in the 70s.
I know the difference and stand by my comment.
I think that movie stokes a lot of imagination when someone sees it.
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