As reported by Space.com, engineers and scientists from the Glenn Research Center of NASA completed the ground tests of a compact nuclear reactor with a capacity of 10 kilowatts, which we wrote about earlier this year. In the future, the installation is planned to be used in space, as well as on other planets, to provide space colonies with electricity.
"We are the first Americans who managed to create a new type of nuclear reactor in the last four decades and to test its work. Unlike radioisotope sources, the power of such a current generator can be increased or lowered, which will prolong the time of its operation and allow producing large amounts of energy that are inaccessible to RTGs, "commented Mark Gibson, lead engineer for the Kilopower project.
In recent years, NASA and a number of other space agencies are actively discussing the creation of permanent habitable colonies on the Moon and Mars. The most important task facing the solution of these issues is to ensure their autonomy and cheaper construction. A huge benefit in this direction can offer 3D printing technology that will allow using local resources - soil, rocks and gases from the atmosphere, - for building buildings on site.
As the experiments on board the International Space Station, as well as on Earth, show, with the help of three-dimensional printing it is possible to create practically everything necessary for the life of the colonists. The only and, perhaps, the most important exception is the power source, the power of which would be sufficient both for the work of the 3D printer itself, and for powering and heating the entire base.
For the past six years, NASA engineers, together with leading American nuclear centers, are working on a portable nuclear reactor that could be literally carried around, delivered to another planet with existing carrier rockets, and with the new super-heavy SLS platform , which is planned to be used for flights to the Moon and Mars.
The task, according to Gibson, is far from being as simple as it might seem, since in the space, the Moon or the same Mars, due to the complete or almost complete absence of air, the task of cooling the nuclear reactor will become much more complicated. And compact installations will impose even more restrictions, therefore the majority of such installations have extremely complex device and exotic systems of heat exchange and cooling.
The development of the same Gibson - Kilopower reactor - is something between the classical nuclear reactor in which nuclear fuel is cooled by water and a steam engine that converts the energy of heat and pressure into motion and electricity.
It is based on the so-called Stirling engine - a steam engine invented by the Scottish priest Robert Stirling in the beginning of the XIX century. In this case, it is a set of a closed system of pipes and vessels filled with liquid sodium, and pistons, on which the molten metal, heated by an arbitrary heat source, presses.
Engineers from NASA and the National Research Center in Nevada have further modified this system so that it not only generates current, but also controls the decay of uranium-235, suppressing it at an excessively high reaction rate and strengthening with a decrease in reactor power.
The first prototype Kilopower was assembled in December last year. The next three months, it was checked its stability in regular and abnormal situations. As noted by the lead designer of the project, David Poston, Kilopower successfully passed all tests and exceeded NASA's expectations.
According to him, the reactor did not go into a critical state and continued to generate electricity even in the event of multiple breakdowns in the cooling system and pumping out heat from the core. Scientists hope that by 2020 they will be able to create the first machine ready for real work, which can be used in space and in the long term at the colonization of the Moon and Mars.
The article is based on materials .
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