Henry Spencer wrote: > > On Mon, 24 Feb 2003, David Weinshenker wrote: > > > gas core nuclear > > > > Is there such a thing? I hear occasional > > references to such a concept, but never > > enough detail to get an actual image of > > how it would work. > > Well, depends on your definition of "is". :-) It's been proposed, it's a > respectable concept, there was work done on it in the 60s and again > briefly in the 90s, but nobody's ever built one or even drawn up detailed > blueprints for one. > > The idea is simply to have a nuclear reactor whose fission fuel is an > incandescent gas, with reaction mass (typically hydrogen) heated by > thermal radiation from the core gas. The big trick is maintaining a > reasonably stable blob of very hot uranium-rich gas without having it mix > with the hydrogen too much (because you don't want to lose fission fuel > out the exhaust) or melt through the walls. There are ideas on how to do > this, but no complete fully-designed fully-understood solution.
And even if a feasible steady-state solution for _that_ existed, there are still such slight matters as startup, shutdown, power control and reactivity management, and test and development... sounds like something to be developed in orbital vacuum or on a sacrificial rock out in the Belt. (And quite possibly by remote control: I think in this case it may turn out, more literally than usual, that "the devil is in the details"...!) > The attraction is an Isp of 3000-5000s with respectable thrust, enough > to accelerate a realistic vehicle at maybe 0.1G. Hmmm... sounds like something for a deep extra-system mission... start with a chunk of ring ice for reaction mass, clamp a propulsion pod on one end, tap off a small slice of the semi-infinite radiant power for communications (it doesn't matter if you're far from Sol when you have a portable micro-sun in your back pocket), and just aim this thing out like an ant pushing an ever-shrinking breadcrumb on an out-of-plane solar escape observation mission: something like the recent ion-rocket "Seep Space" thing but more so, and the transmitter power to push a multi-kilowatt high-bandwidth signal back from a probe a long way from the Sun... -dave w _______________________________________________ ERPS-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.erps.org/mailman/listinfo/erps-list
