That atomic bean counting could add up to significant time savings. "Nuclear thermal propulsion can enable you to get to Mars faster, on the order of twice as fast," said Vishal Patel, a researcher involved in subcontract work for BWXT at the Ultra Safe Nuclear Corp. in Los Alamos, New Mexico. "We're looking at nice 3- to 4-month transit times."
"The key thing is, [the NERVA rocket] was extremely well documented," said John Helmey, project manager for BWXT's NTP project. "We aren't starting from scratch. We're building upon really good work that was done back in that time frame," he told Space.com. Over the course of the contract, which extends through 2019, BWXT will develop conceptual designs focusing on fuel elements and the reactor core.
The potential for trace levels of radioactivity in the engine exhaust means that engineers can no longer let clouds of hydrogen gas billow into the atmosphere. Instead, BWXT plans to test a trick developed at NASA's Stennis Space Center and combust the hydrogen gas with oxygen to make easy-to-catch water. Early, small-scale demonstrations will use non-nuclear hydrogen gas to test this exhaust-capturing method, but water from future nuclear tests could be decontaminated with off-the-shelf technology.
What's more, NERVA ran on 90 percent highly enriched uranium that would today qualify as weapons-grade. But because the fission process throws off more than enough heat, those levels are overkill, Patel said. BWXT's designs will harness material enriched to just below 20 percent, putting it in the less-tightly regulated low enriched uranium (LEU) category. On top of allowing safer reactors, the modest levels of fissionable material could open the door to more public-private partnerships.
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All this talk about revisiting NERVA makes me wonder if they've looked at alternatives to uranium and plutonium. I know there were some numbers run on Americium for gas core NTRs, but the solid NTR power sources only seem to ever be the two usual suspects.
ReplyDeleteWilliam Black seems like the best person to ask about this.
ReplyDeleteWell, the bean-counter factor is the supposed cost savings from leveraging the existing NERVA research. As opposed to doing new research with Americium.
ReplyDeleteSo they could put their money into just engineering, instead of research+engineering.
For me the interesting point is they are redesigning it to use 20% enriched uranium, as used in commercial reactors.
Instead of the NERVA using weapons-grade uranium, which makes everybody paranoid.
I'm with Dogmatic Pyrrhonist, uranium and plutonium seem to be the alternatives for straight forward NTR's from pretty much every paper I've read. Winchell Chung might know of other alternatives.
ReplyDeleteWilliam Black
ReplyDeleteI've read about vague reference to Americium solid-core rockets, but I have not seen actual designs.
Wow, I am getting my notifications late -- what's up with G+? When I responded to this (about 38 minutes ago) Winchell Chung's comment (about 1 hour ago) was invisible -- at least to me.
ReplyDeleteWilliam Black
ReplyDeleteG+ notification system is all messed up. It intermittently chokes.
Related... nasa.gov - New NASA Contract Will Advance Nuclear Thermal Propulsion Technology
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