Right, the world seems to have one heck of a lot of stored plutonium, and with the lack of a nuclear war to use it in, its all beginning to be rather an embarrassment. So a lot of spacecraft have been running on Thermoelectric generators for many many years, why not make up some large ones inside a huge chunk of cheap concrete and use them to give us power? Brian
Nothing like enough, in fact. Also, there are good reasons not to put too much of it in one place :-)
It has gone a bit out of fashion for spacecraft, too.
I think it was Walter Marshall (although it could have been James Lovelock) who said he would be happy to have a few kW of glassified waste shielded by a metre or so of concrete at the bottom of his garden for CH/DHW. As would I; but there isn't enough for all of us.
There is actually a severe shortage of the right Pu238 isotope for TEG which has effectively priced some deep space missions out of the game.
It is a hell of a way to light a single incandescent bulb on Earth or maybe 10x LED ones if you choose wisely.
The Soviet Union built around 1,000 lighthouses run off thermoelectric nuclear power units.
They lost a lot of them - people nicked them, took them apart and irradiated themselves or dropped the radioisotope in the ice where they just melted their way through and got lost underneath. You can read all about their demise in a few places on the web. And for the few which weren't lost, the crumbling of the Soviet Union left no body responsible for their decommisioning and disposal. They didn't use plutonium in them though.
You could probably go there & buy one. A journalist managed to arrangedd to buy a small nuke bomb iirc!
NT
Not to mention the ones whose locations were simply forgotten.
Same principle though. They used Strontium-90 and the units had a 10 year design life, long since past.
It's hair raising reading - such as the radioactive core from a unit found left at a bus stop, several dropped into the sea, several found dismantled in scrap yards, etc.
Yes obviously one does not put a large amount together, for I hope obvious reasons, but you say not enough of it, from what I hear across the world there are loads of the stuff which have to be kept apart in under critical sized ingots sealed from the atmosphere. Brian
Wrong sort of Plutonium eh? Must have been a British idea then, as we have problems with the wrong type of snow, rain, wind etc quite a lot over here. Brian
Oh, what did they use then? I remember seeing a nice piece of fiction on the telly many years ago where the security at a privately owned reactor had allowed some criminals and a girl who had a mental problem to get some of the stuff out, but the low tech crims who they hired to get it were completely ignorant and when one of the m small billets was damaged and air got in, and it started to oxidise and smp oke, the idiot chucked it into a lake and managed to poluter the water supply to a small w town and kill himself in the process. Not sure how realistic it was but it certinly made me a bit worried at the time. brian
The "hot" isotope is Pu 238 which gives about half a watt (thermal) per gram. I think the UK has less than 100 tons of various Pu isotopes in store, mostly Pu 239 which has a much longer half life (not the whole story but I'd be surprised if the thermal output was higher).
If it was all 238, that gives around 50 MW of heat or around 1 watt per UK adult.
Strontium-90 was common, but they may have used other things. In terms of radioactivity, it's much worse than plutonium-238.
And that, Brian, in a nutshell, is essentially the phrase that characterises 99% of the BBC and Guardian outpourings of the last 50 years.
There are only a few kg of 238 left in the world. The US ran out and has been buying up Russia's stock, but no one had made any for a decade or so, and it has too short a half life to occur naturally. What's left has already been allocated for a few space missions beyond Mars, where solar panels can't be used.
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