Nuclear Powered Rockets I just read where the European Space Agency is experimenting with trying to create a nuclear powered rocket. There is no doubt they would be faster, but also create other problems. It is said a nuclear rocket can be three or more times more efficient than a chemical one, shortening the time it would take to reach its target. It is still not the answer however to get to the speed needed to make human space travel convenient. If Mars is at a reasonable distance from Earth, a chemical rocket would take about 7 months to reach it. It is said a nuclear powered one would take around 2 months. A lot better, but still not ideal. Space scientists have been dreaming about different ways they could use nuclear reactors to power spacecraft for many decades. One way seemed a bit frightening to me. Scientists had figured out a nuclear explosion had a lot of energy. Duh! They began to figure out how a spacecraft could survive the explosion and take advantage of the energy wave it created to propel the craft. The idea they came up with was a ship which would continuously create nuclear explosions in space which the ship would ride on. Talk about a nightmare scenario. Nobody ever said hey maybe this would cause some damage somewhere or that the radiation released might be harmful in some way. Can you imagine an extraterrestrial ship flying through space which encountered one of these explosions? Just think about what other countries would have thought about us if we used this type of propulsion to power our ships for example. After a while the entire earth would be contaminated and everyone dead. It is so impractical it blows my mind it ever would have been considered. The United States has also talked about creating nuclear rockets, and I am willing to bet if another country is considering it, we must be also. It would be very handy to use to get to the moon if it wasn’t so dangerous. We could get there in about a day. What makes it so dangerous is a couple of things. The first is if one crashes, it might spread radiation all over the place it crashed on. There had been talk at one time of nuclear powered aircraft, but this was thought to be too risky if they crashed. The same problem exist with spacecraft. Another problem could be radiation leaks. This has already occurred according to some UFO investigators who claim some pyramid shaped UAPs which flew over some cars were ours and they contaminated and caused radiation poisoning to several people on the ground who got cancer. The case was thrown out of court after the government denied the craft was theirs. Practically speaking, nuclear reactors need a lot of heavy shielding. This makes them harder to launch. The ideal way to build one would be in space. One of the problems we have with nuclear propulsion or NTP systems is they are powered by fission, which is the most dangerous type of nuclear energy and which creates nuclear waste which has to be safely disposed of, which is theoretically impossible since it stays radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years. If we could develop a nuclear fusion engine it would produce no waste and be safe, because if something goes wrong it just stops. We have been trying to develop this engine for tens of years. Another problem which is said to exist is these types of rockets have to be launched from earth by a chemical rocket. One amazing fact is the nuclear rocket does not produce enough thrust to be launched from Earth on its own, even though it is faster than a chemical rocket in space. Even if it did, the idea of turning on the reactor before a launch seems foolhardy. Can you imagine the damage it could do if it crashed back to earth? We actually built a few nuclear powered rockets and tested them but the program didn’t last and ended over 50 years ago. Things have changed a lot since then. Technology has made a giant leap forward, and I am sure there are plenty of secrets which might be able to be used in a nuclear rocket. The government has been keeping up with advancements in nuclear propulsion and has accepted designs for a new type of nuclear engine. Even the nuclear fuel is being experimented with. We are more concerned with rocket launches than people know. We could have sent all our nuclear waste into space and it was thought about, but felt it was far too dangerous to do. The reason for this was we would have had to load it into rockets and launch them. If just one would have exploded it would have spread dangerous radiation all over us. Knowing this, the nuclear powered craft would have to somehow be built in a way they would not send nuclear material or radiation all over us if the rocket they were on exploded. Another problem with nuclear powered rockets is the high cost of building and maintaining them. Nuclear power plants on earth have been reasonably safe, but not 100 percent. Who could ever forget the explosion at Chernobyl. This proved after nuclear contamination the area around the explosion would not be safe for many years and the area around Chernobyl is still a no man’s land. Another disaster was the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan which is still dumping radioactive water into the ocean all these years later. The first nuclear plant accident occurred at the Chalk River Laboratories in Canada in 1952. There were a lot more nuclear reactor accidents than most people know. It is said there were in excess of 100 if we count the nuclear power plants on ships. It is said there were 439 nuclear power plants in the world as of May, 2022. You can see they are probably not as safe as you first thought. All these statistics come from different places and I can’t vouch for there preciseness, but they were the best I could find. I guess the figures are not as bad as they seem because there have been many nuclear powerplants which have been shut down or decommissioned and if we add them to the total, the percentages of disasters get lowered. Finally, there is a new form of fission reactor which is said to be able to produce power at lower temperatures and the waste is said to be encased in salt and rendered harmless. The salt is also the cooling agent for the reactor. They seem to be much safer than the current fission reactors. Although these reactors have been around since the 1960, new technology has made them much safer.
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