As the portal Space.com engineers and scientists from the Research center NASA’s Glenn has completed ground tests of a compact nuclear reactor with a capacity of 10 kilowatts, which we wrote about earlier in the year. In the future the installation is planned to use in space and on other planets for space colonies by electricity.
“We the first Americans, who managed over the past four decades to create a new type of nuclear reactor and to test it. Unlike radioisotope sources, the capacity of the generator current can increase or decrease that will extend its work and will produce large amounts of energy inaccessible to RTGs,” commented mark Gibson, senior project engineer Kilopower.
In recent years, NASA and other space agencies actively discussed the issues on creation of permanent manned colonies on the moon and Mars. A major challenge in addressing these issues is to ensure their autonomy and reduce the cost of construction. A huge benefit in this direction can offer the technologies of 3D printing, which will use local resources – soil, rocks, and gases from the atmosphere, – for the construction of buildings right on the spot.
As shown by experiments on Board the International space station and on Earth, using three-dimensional printing you can create almost all the necessities of life of the colonists. The only, and perhaps the most important exception is the power source of the power which would suffice to work the 3D printer and to power and heat the whole base.
About the last six years, NASA engineers in cooperation with leading American nuclear centers are working to create portable nuclear reactor that could, literally, to carry, to ship on another planet, using existing launch vehicles and using the new SLS super-heavy platform that you plan to use for missions to the moon and Mars.
The problem, according to Gibson, is not as simple as it may seem, because in space, the moon or on Mars is the same due to the complete or almost complete lack of air is substantially complicated the task of cooling a nuclear reactor. A compact installation will impose even more restrictions, so most of these plants have very complex device and an exotic system of heat exchange and cooling.
The development of the same Gibson — reactor Kilopower – is something of a cross between the classic nuclear reactor in which nuclear fuel is cooled by water, and a steam engine that converts the energy of heat and pressure in motion and electricity.
It is based on the so-called Stirling engine – steam engine invented by Scottish clergyman Robert Stirling in the early XIX century. In this case it represents the set of the closed-loop system of pipes and vessels filled with liquid sodium, and the pistons which presses the molten metal, heated by an arbitrary heat source.
Engineers from NASA and the National research centre in Nevada are additionally modified this setting so that it not only produced the current, but managed the process of disintegration of uranium-235, suppressing it at too high speed of reactions and increasing at lower power reactor.
Kilopower the first prototype was assembled in December of last year. The next three months we tested its stability in normal and emergency situations. As said the lead project engineer David Poston, Kilopower successfully passed all tests and exceeded the expectations of NASA.
In his words, the reactor did not go critical and continue to produce electricity even in the case of multiple failures in the cooling system and pumping heat from the active zone. Scientists hope that by 2020 they will be able to create the first ready for the real working machine, which can be used in space and in the future during the colonization of the moon and Mars.
Completed tests of a compact nuclear reactor for space colonies
Nikolai Khizhnyak