Whoa: The real Prometheus

[_Owen_]

Oh, that's ok, I had a feeling that you might be joking, but I didn't know if you were actually serious. lol.

In response to sharky277, that is a very good link I will check it out in detail when I have a second.

Owen Macri

[6thMonolith]

This is a better link...

http://prometheus.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm

I found that site when I was bored, a few weeks ago(so I wasn't surprised when this thread started). I always check http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov for updates. They have some pretty nice pics of saturn/titan that I use for desktops.

[_Owen_]

Cool!

Owen Macri

[Avatar28]

It's not just trips to Jupiter where nuclear would be important. For ANY serious interplanetary manned mission, nuclear is the way to go. For a sizeable manned mission to Mars, they're going to want to have a nuclear reactor on board for power. Furthermore, there are several nuclear based options for propulsion that would allow for much greater efficiencies and higher speeds if we were to seriously pursue it.

The best possible course would be some sort of Orion drive variant. Look it up if you want more info on it, but basically the idea is that you have a ship with a pusher plate mounted on large shock absorbers. You set of a nuclear explosion next to the plate. The force of the explosion pushes the plate (and thus the ship) forward. Repeat. You do this fairly rapidly and you get a good acceleration.

The best thing about an Orion drive is that the thrust is incredibly high, in the MILLIONS of TONS. By comparison, the huge SRBs on the shuttle only offer around 2 million LBS of thrust. An Orion drive would allow for some truly incredibly massive ships. It would be no trouble at all to have a ship two to three times larger than an modern naval aircraft carrier if you wished.

Unfortunately, due to the nuclear test ban treaty, and the political climate, setting off lots of nukes (even small ones) in space isn't likely to occur in the near future.

Our true best bet in the near term (say the next two to three decades) is probably going to be VASIMR. It's a plasma drive and is throttleable between high efficiencey and high thrust. Basically it uses microwaves to heat a hydrogen plasma to several million degrees Kelvin and this plasma is used for thrust. It may be possible to even add a fusion component into the drive which would GREATLY increase the thrust it can produce even further. A full scale VASIMR drive would be able to use a "low gear" high thrust, low efficiency mode to climb out of the gravity well of a planet and break orbit towards interplanetary space. At that point it switches into "high gear," lower thrust big very high efficiency. At the moment, unfortunately, the thrust levels are still far too low to be able to actually go from surface to orbit so you're still stuck with chemical rockets or some other form of propusion for that.

[_Owen_]

In space size does not matter, a nuclear reaction would push a ship twenty times earth just as far as it would push my pen. You know, if it didn't completly destroy it first, lol.

Owen Macri

[Avatar28]

Mass still matters in space. The more something weighs, the more power it takes to change the velocity a given amount.

[_Owen_]

There is no weight in space other than the very small amount when you are within a gravitational field, but it is only a miniscule amount of wieght. So weight would not matter in space either.

Owen Macri

[6thMonolith]

Weight is not an issue, but inertia is.

[_Owen_]

Yes, but without gravity or friction the inertia of a large object and a smal object propeled by the same force would be the same. It is a common mistake in shows like Star Trek, when they are trying to move something with their tractor beams and they aren't strong enough to move them.

EDIT: Newtons' First Law, Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.

So a ship for example in space, at rest, will remain at rest, unless effected by another force like a tractor beam or more specifically kinetic energy. Normally this force would be weakend by other forces such as gravity and friction however in space these do not apply, unless in a unique circumstance like is the object is effected immensly by a gravitational field or there is constant friction against the object.

Owen Macri

[Odin's eyes]

There is no single solution to power production. Every solution has downsides that make using them impractical in many cases. We're going to have to use wind, solar, tidal, geothermal and nuclear in places where those solutions will work most efficiently and have the least impact on the environment.

Cut your post down a bit so I won't take up so much space.

Jarnin, I'm not suggesting that we should only build wind power.
There's lots of great alternatives to what we have today.

Nuclear power in the western nations is safe, yes. There's a lot of safe guards against a melt down. But I'm a bit more concerned about those in the old Sovjet Union...
And the waste... I'll come to that later.

Yes, solar power is one way to go but it takes up too much land acres to be viable for anything truly large scale. Nations that has deserts are the ones that can use solar power at it's best since they really don't have a problem with finding space or worry about if the sun will shine or not.

Geothermal... again, it's good, but only for some nations. You really have to be near the edges of the continental plates to get some major power from it.
(Closer down to get enough heat) Island would be the best example of this since they already get all their power from geothermal powerplants. For nations that are far away from the continental plates the potential is not so good. Sure, you can heat up your own house but it's too expensive to dig deep enough for a geothermal power plant.

Tidal power? Never going to be more then a minor part in any nations power supply, even if they do make it to work so it can generate more power then today. I simply don't see it generating enough power compared to what other options can do.

Wave power: Scientists have for years tried to harness the power of the waves. Not very successfully I might add... But now there's some movement on that front that looks promising. A swedish team will set out a few wave power generators sometime next year. If they simply buildt... I think 10 acres (I just forgot the exact number ) of those wave power generators it would generate enough power for Sweden.
Mind you that there really isn't so many high waves along the swedish shores so if you placed them in the North Sea instead they would generate many times more then that.
There's also plans to try and build something akin to a wind turbine that would instead tap into the power of underwater currents, such as the Gulf stream. Major potential there...
Of course the wave power option and the underwater currents turbines won't happen for another 15 or 20 years. But we can hope...


And now I return to the nuclear waste...

Until something better then nuclear power comes up to replace it the EU, lead by France is throwing large amounts of money into research on transmutation. The goal there is to in the end make the nuclear waste a lot safer and instead of keeping it locked away for 100's of thousands of years until it's safe, it will only take about 1000 years.
It's this whole proccess of taking out the uranium from the waste and re-using it. I'm not too clear on the details as I've only heard very little on this.

All my info comes mainly from swedish news sources so I may not have the full truth on all of these issues. I'm sure somone will correct me if I'm wrong about something.

I think that was the longest post I've ever made...

[_Owen_]

Lol, that was a good post, as for the nuclear waste idea, it has potential but as of now we don't really have the technology to properly extract and utilise the uranium in large amounts in nuclear waste. Trying to extract and reuse it is like buring a log picking up all of the ashes putting them together and buring them to accomplish a source of heat and light energy. It is far easier to just go and use another log, or in this case fresh uranium, however this is wasteful when you do technically have uranium that hasn't been used yet that can be reused.

I guess what I am saying is the concept is a smart one, however it would take a while to complete the procces. If we could develop a faster way it might be more efficient.

Owen Macri

[Avatar28]

Actually, we only use a small amount of the fuel anyways. But the concept (and the technology) actually works today with reactors that are designed for it. I'm not sure what would be involved in retrofitting a reactor to do it that wasn't designed for it.

Fusion on a large scale, especially He3 fusion, would be the ideal answer. No possibility of meltdown and very very little radioactive waste.

[Jarnin]

Yes, solar power is one way to go but it takes up too much land acres to be viable for anything truly large scale. Nations that has deserts are the ones that can use solar power at it's best since they really don't have a problem with finding space or worry about if the sun will shine or not.

People used to say the same thing about telephones. You have to wire the world or else it won't work everywhere. Then Arthur C. Clarke invented the communication satellite, and now we have global communications.

Read up on Space Solar Power.

Until something better then nuclear power comes up to replace it the EU, lead by France is throwing large amounts of money into research on transmutation. The goal there is to in the end make the nuclear waste a lot safer and instead of keeping it locked away for 100's of thousands of years until it's safe, it will only take about 1000 years.
It's this whole proccess of taking out the uranium from the waste and re-using it. I'm not too clear on the details as I've only heard very little on this.

Transmutation is a good way to deal with the waste. It uses spent fuel and turns it into an isotope that doesn't have such a long halflife. There are actually reactor designs that burn nuclear waste and whose products last for less than 30 years. Integral Fast Reactor designs allow you to never have the waste leave the plant; it's used until it's no longer radioactive.

Even without recycling, storing waste in glass blocks and burying it in a geologically stable environment is a better alternative to spewing waste into the air.

[_Owen_]

Nice post Jarnin!

Even without recycling, storing waste in glass blocks and burying it in a geologically stable environment is a better alternative to spewing waste into the air.

Really?!? You aren't stating the obvious at all! (Sarcastically) lol!

Seriously though I agree.

Owen Macri

[Avatar28]

I'd rather have a nuke plant in my town than coal any day. Coal plants release FAR FAR more radiation into the environment than a nuke plant. In fact, you would generally receive a lower radiation dose INSIDE a nuclear plant than you would standing around outside far away from it.

Space based power production is great in theory. But launch costs are still far too prohibitive. Those would first have to come way down. Any really significant solar power station would need to be kilometers long. That's going to amount to a fair bit of weight no matter how you scale it.

Now if we were to build a space elevator then that would definitely drop costs to the point that we could probably build something like that and have it competitive. It would also enable us to quite easily launch interplanetary missions and put much larger payloads and have larger ships.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke once predicted that a space elevator would be built about a decade after people stopped laughing. Guess what? People are stopping laughing about it.