NASA Struggles Over Deep-Space Plutonium Power
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
Small story from reddit: This guy worked in a government office where his boss would order multi-thousand page reports to be rush delivered to the office, which cost anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars depending on the report; and then took a single paper out and trashed the rest- because she didn't know you could just print single pages.
Want less waste? Make it smaller. This will, of course, decrease its capabilities (which might not be a bad thing). If you want it to have the same capabilities as it currently has, the waste is going to stay as an unpleasant side effect.
Well, a big chunk of what we talk about when it comes to military spending is developing new weapons systems. The nature of the cost problems there is a little different.
We (the US) have a space program because of the military. In fact, the military/intelligence space program is booming and space-based companies are going to be very healthy supporting military missions to LEO and beyond for the foreseeable future.
Real world costs aren't entirely here considering this thing isn't built, but 500m is the planned cost and should be doable. Worst case scenario it costs us what the shuttles cost, except we're no longer trapped in LEO.
Worse is the politically-driven directives given to NASA. Human space flight, for example, generates very little science per dollar spent. It's basically PR.
[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/space_20/20...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Newt_Gi...
That's why research and bureaucracy is spread all over the country instead of being more efficiently consolidated in one place. That's why mission control is done in Houston instead of Florida. That's why the shuttle SRBs were built inland in Utah instead of somewhere they could be shipped to Florida by barge (with no need for the famous o-rings).
You don't like Republicans. We get that. But maybe you should become familiar with the subject before making blanket statements like that.
Space, not so much. Refocus the young from the Kardashians to space and eventually we might sway politicians. For the most part I think commercial exploitation of space is more likely once the money factor works itself out. Then science can hitch rides and have more interest in it as commercial interest increase awareness
Best thing people can do who don't like what is happening with their tax money is to vote and be vocal. If you negate yourself into I hate politics you reinforce the need to feed the proponents your disagree with.
Instead, I choose to optimize for my own happiness. Politics, especially because you're just shouting against the rain, makes me incredibly unhappy, so I avoid it.
Others are free to spend their time as they wish, but I am simultaneously cynical about the system and as removed and detached from it as I can be in order to focus on my own happiness.
When I help in campaigns I always focus on super voters. I knock on every door. They are white and wealthy. Working class I know one out of every 100 doors maybe?
Your local politics is where things happen. In my city I ran for School Board (lost by 400 votes but will run again). The turn out was 11%! Everyone HATES our Public School System here in my city due to a number of factors but no one votes. So if you want to get open data for your town city you can do that. (That is what I was running for was open data and government in my school district and now the whole thing is getting audited by the state to see if they comply with the Sunshine Law (They don't)).
Politics will never cease to be a complete waste of time for some people until the rules are changed such that all evidence of their participation is not completely eradicated before the results are determined.
Should all those people who vote Green or Libertarian or Constitution parties in their U.S. elections just double down on their efforts and vote harder? Should they steer even more conversations into long-winded tirades about politics?
I have sampled the "getting more involved" tactic. It is worse than a waste of time. Sometimes you suffer retaliation for "rubbing the cat the wrong way". If you want to make a difference, vote with your feet, and vote with your wallet. Voting with your vote only lends support to those who believe that voting means you must meekly accept the results.
It seems odd to suggest that if you hate something, you should do it more. If you truly despite politics, you should be exploring other means to accomplish your goals. Start a nonprofit business. Create an advocacy group. Create a community nexus for like-minded individuals to trade ideas. Write a book that browbeats your personal opinions into the reader with the help of a flimsy sci-fi plot line. Hell, create a for-profit business, and spend the profits on the thing you wanted the government to do.
Well than kill democracy and invent a new government system. Voting is the most important part of a Democracy.
To what end is your point now? No one voting but a few and they decide the election????
"I hate politics!" does not mean I hate voting. Voting is making your statement of yes or no.
> Sometimes you suffer retaliation for "rubbing the cat the wrong way". Voting is silent and no one knows what you voted for.
If you live in a Democracy you have to vote. If you are fine with Democracy dying than don't vote especially in local elections.
Parliamentary procedures and rules of order are routinely used to prevent proposals from ever getting to a vote.
Don't conflate voting with democracy. It is but one element in a much larger tangle of worms, and it is emphatically not the most important.
If you ever do more in politics than just show up to mark ballots, you may see the retaliation in action. The cloud video services have plenty of examples, mostly from open records activists who do little more than just show up to public places with their cameras.
Protests, complaints, and petitions for redress are also part of democracy. Have you ever walked in to a police station and asked for an official complaint form? Depending on your locale, that may be a very easy way to experience petty retaliation firsthand.
If you don't vote the rest really doesn't matter that much.
If someone is complaining about government the first thing I ask is "Do you vote?" Voting is the Democratic government system by its very definition. If you say you don't vote I really (Wrongly) don't want to hear any complaints because you removed yourself from our political system. We are in crisis in United States due to lack of voting to the point where only extremist vote and the majority voluntarily hand over the political powers to extremist. This is why reasonable people have a hard time getting past the primaries in national elections i.e. Trump's popularity is decided by extremist. The MORE people vote the weaker extremist voices matter.
You hear someone say, "But I don't like colas." And your response is, "You still need to drink one, so pick."
If you don't vote, it could just be because you feel that every option is equally bad. People decline to vote for a variety of reasons, but not having any appealing options is certainly a very common one.
I personally don't even know the difference between Coke and Pepsi. I like grapefruit juice. If a saw orange juice--or even apple juice--on the ballot, I might vote for it. But year after year, it's always cola versus cola. My concern is if I vote for one or the other, someone might think that's what I actually wanted. I think there are a lot of other people out there that do vote for a cola when they actually want beer, or tea, or water, or purple drank, or merlot, or lemonade, or vodka. So when they see a Mr. Pibb or a Dr. Pepper in the wings, they jump on that like a Fremen after a week in the desert with a torn stillsuit.
Trump's popularity derives from the enforced homogeneity of the elections. Neither major party wants to allow a fringe candidate, because they think those extremists that would otherwise peel away should be voting for them. So they have both painted themselves into the same corner.
Maybe you should follow up that "Do you vote?" question with "Do you actually want the things you vote for?" My opinion is that if you cannot vote for something you want, the vote is not democratic. It becomes a cargo cult ritual in imitation of democracy.
The crisis is not lack of voting. It is that people can no longer effectively express their will through voting. And that came about due to politics as usual. Gerrymandering. Restrictive ballot access laws. Winner takes all elections. Pre-primary deal-brokering. Media spin.
So thanks for your opinion on the importance of voting, but I simply don't see it that way. There are more options for you to choose from than those that are laid out for you. Sometimes you just have to kick over the cups and stab the giant in the eye.
That is why it is important to be an influence with the vote.
I never pull the party lever but I also know local politics really is the foundation for our political system and if you like Cherry Coke let your local politician know what you want. Heck follow them on FaceBook and talk with them.
Non-cola-likers have always fared better with protest demonstrations, news media publicity, and rights-based lawsuits. Voting has done nothing.
With the entrenched structure of the system in place, any issue that is not likely to switch your vote from Coke to Pepsi, or vice versa, can be safely ignored. Don't like that much sugar/HFCS? Ignored. Don't like carbonation? Ignored. Don't like caramel color? Ignored. Don't like phosphoric acid? Ignored. But if you like Cherry Coke better than regular Coke, well then Pepsi might just trial-run a Lemon Pepsi! Do I vote for that because it is closer to grapefruit juice than anything else on the ballot, or not vote for it because it's still just another falalahking cola?
The only group likely to make even a tiny dent in the status quo of Beverageland is the people who like coffee. But coffee never stands for election. Nobody ever even considers that coffee might be better than any cola. What does this mean metaphorically? I don't know; it ran away from me there.
It's also unreasonably expensive today.
In most Congressional districts, the party has so gerrymandered the districts that it's easier to dislodge communist dictators than defeat the incumbent party.
Even if the above weren't true, our voting system encourages a two-party system with its winner-take-all rules, so third parties like the Green Party or Libertarian Party aren't as popular as they might otherwise be because of the 'wasting your vote' phenomenon.
As an outsider, I find people here in the US (or probably just SF) to be more active for their causes. But it's not enough. There is no easy tech solution here. People have to have their voices heard. Otherwise, voting is useless. You can only choose between the choices given to you not the choices you want.
Vote locally. That is the root of our political system and where people can easily make a difference.
In the US you can have (and have had) the case where someone can become president despite the majority wanting someone else.
Having a popular vote hurts nation wide groups and our current system is good. Also one the least impact votes you will cast will be for President he/she really does very little that impacts your day to day.
The Planetary Society is one organization actively involved in promoting greater funding for space exploration.
I do vote. I have a hard time convincing myself that it's even worth the time it takes to do so, but I do it.
I've tried writing to my representatives to express my views. I get form letters in response, with absolutely no indication that my voice has been taken into account in even the smallest way.
People say you should get involved in local party meetings and such, but there are no viable parties that I agree with even remotely, and in any case I'd rather stab myself in the eyeballs with a toothpick than attend such meetings.
They listen; they just don't have the staffing to write an individual response to every comment. Unfortunately, they listen by having a staffer say "We had X people contact us in favor of this; Y were opposed." But they do listen. Or: Our voices have been abstracted into sort of a reverse-poll thanks, in part, to technology.
As an anecdote, the only time I had a staffer actually respond to my opinion with more than "I'll pass along your comment" was during the SOPA/PIPA call ins. The staffer I spoke to was clearly (and kind of understandably) irritated with the volume of calls and was somewhat short with me. I think everyone views that whole thing as an exception, though.
The latter statement really calls the first into question. Similarly, they care about my vote, except to the extent that it's completely lost in the noise of thousands of other votes.
However, there's an obvious difference when one sends letters or emails to the federal level. When I've gotten responses, it's always been at least several weeks later, and sometimes several months. The messages I've received have been loosely related to my original message, but they have never addressed any actual point I might have made. I'm not feeling the love.
It's systemic lack of involvement that's causing the most issues in American politics. From the top with "lifetime senators" largely immune from their constituencies, and from the bottom with voter turnouts under twenty percent.
That's assuming you're in the US, but I expect it's pretty similar in all the other Western democracies.
Speak or be spoken for by those who do.
Such a weird word. By its very core, it is about things you are entitled to. Like SS, which you are entitled to because you paid into it.
But yet calling someone entitled, and the use of the word entitlements, is meant to describe someone thinking they are entitled to something they aren't. It is a word that in practice means the opposite of what it should mean in theory, especially when used in a political sense.
Also, social spending will always be more for any well run nation, so that shouldn't be a surprise. We have a social security system that we pay into that everyone is part of. Its a huge program and calling something I'm paying a lot into right now an entitlement is disingenious. Total military spending worldwide is probably a better metric. USA is first at 580b, China at 128b, SA at 80n, and Russia at 70b.
Personally, I have no problem with spending on this level. I believe the USA is the best nation to have this type of global policing power and maintaining it should be one of our top national goals. Especially in regards to helping and continuing to work with our NATO, Korean, and Japanese allies and to protect them from hostile foreign powers.
“The project is planning to produce new Pu-238 at a rate that supports currently projected NASA missions,” says Rebecca Onuschak, program director for the DOE’s plutonium infrastructure. “There is no shortfall of material projected to meeting those needs, and so no remedy or action plan has been implemented.”
---
The argument that if NASA had more RTG's laying around it would be doing more is a bit suspicious as that's not how space missions are planned. Not to mention, Charles Bolden just wrote a letter to Congress asking them why they can't fund the SLS properly. There's no extra money laying around.
SLS is a white elephant that currently has nothing to do. The first crewed mission is scheduled for 2021, and plans beyond that are hazy. NASA managers have looked into "how seldom" they can launch the thing while still maintaining a safe and viable program.
And the article describes a chilling effect which keeps plutonium-dependent missions from being seen as viable, so of course there will be enough plutonium for all the planned missions (of which there are precious few).
http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/28/9221541/NASA-Charles-Bolde...
It costs around $81 million to send just one astronaut on the Soyuz. Bolden says it will only cost $58 million per seat to send astronauts on the Commercial Crew vehicles. "It’s as if we keep ordering expensive takeout because we haven’t yet set up our own kitchen — only, in this case, the takeout meals are costing us hundreds of millions of dollars," he writes.
“There are tons of things NASA could use the new plutonium for, but there’s nothing on the books,” says Casey Dreier, director of advocacy at the Planetary Society. “Why is that? Because NASA isn’t sure when or if it will have the plutonium it needs!”
I don't think the argument is that NASA would be doing more if it had more RTGs, but rather that without more RTGs there will be new limits on the types of things it can do (no large rovers like MSL or outer solar system missions like Voyager/Cassini/New Horizons).
The Russians use polonium for the same purpose in their spacecraft as the US does using plutonium; heat to generate power suing thermoelectric generators.
The terms "politician" and "brain", when put together, result in a null pointer.
A problem has been detected and Congress has been shut down
to prevent damage.
DRIVER_IRQ_POLITICIAN_ATTEMPTED_TO_USE_BRAIN
If this is the first time you see this Exception: BrainUseAttempt
message, restart Congress. If this screen appears again, follow
these steps:
....Look up the difference between Pu-238 and Pu-239 (what most nuclear warheads carry) and deduce why shooting a rocket filled with Pu-239 might be a bad idea.
It's really dumb that we're going to sit in ignorance of SO MUCH STUFF because someone in the government somewhere is getting into a tiff over this tiny, tiny drop in the government budget. For some perspective, apparently the US Gov spends about $1.7 Billion annually maintaining empty or abandoned federal buildings/land [1]
[1] http://www.npr.org/2014/03/12/287349831/governments-empty-bu...
and a lot more on killing people overseas.
Edit: Seriously? Y'all downvote the parent and upvote this blatantly inflammatory nonsense? Clearly I have no idea what motivates people.
I, personally, am absolutely for giving NASA a lot more money -- even if it's $50M for plutonium production. But the "it's a drop in the bucket" argument isn't really a viable argument when national budgets are just heaps of drops in a really big bucket.
Please explain how you would build a shiny new thorium reactor with 238Pu production capability on a budget competitive with the existing DoE 237Np -> 238Pu transmutation process in an existing research reactor.
The original post was two words. Okay, cute. But then the subsequent "explanation" was four words.
There should have been at least a sentence or two of explanation. At the minimum there could have been a link to Wikipedia. That's common courtesy.
Most people don't come to HN to spend decades learning obscure things, very slowly, from Zen masters.
"...LFTRs produce very little plutonium, around 15 kg per gigawatt-year of electricity (this is the output of a single large reactor over a year). This plutonium is also mostly Pu-238..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reacto...
In a LFTR the fuels are dissolved in liquid salts, so the downside is it may be very difficult to separate out the Pu-238 for use.
I have very little knowledge of the science here, I'm just not sure what all I'm missing.