- Joined
- Dec 16, 2019
Oh, it's absolutely feasible - there are just a few problems with it that we need to sort out, especially when it comes to manned spacecraft. The heat dissipation issue is present whether the craft is manned or unmanned - if it's manned and you can't efficiently dissipate heat, it will be incredibly uncomfortable at best or pretty much roast your crew at worst, unmanned it will make all of the electronics nice and toasty which isn't good for them. At present, on a small scale [not a very large reactor/engine] it could be done, but anything larger you would need absolutely massive radiator panels. With manned spacecraft, there's also the trouble of sufficient shielding/insulation so that your crew isn't being exposed to unhealthy amounts of radiation, and at present most of the shielding materials we could use are quite heavy and thick.
Then you have the ignorance to contend with - the public doesn't really understand nuclear power/propulsion, thanks to almost a century of anti-nuclear agitators [funded by the petroleum lobby and probably at this point 'green energy' producers, too] that pitch a fit every time a new reactor gets spun up. I could write a fucking novella on this subject and I find it absolutely infuriating, but essentially they take every incident and blow it all out of proportion. Chernobyl is by far the most severe nuclear incident and in the broad scheme of things, it really wasn't THAT bad anyway. It was caused by Soviet retardation and was essentially the worst case scenario. Then they always point to Three Mile Island for domestic incidents, but neglect to mention that NOBODY FUCKING DIED OR GOT SICK as a result of the TMI incident - not a single person can be proven to have gotten ill from it, everyone did what they were supposed to do. TMI is actually an example of a nuclear incident being handled perfectly, the other reactor still functions just fine to this day and will now be used to provide energy for a datacenter. I believe the locals living closest to the power plant got a dose on par with a single chest X-ray - TMI was the nothingburger of all nothingburgers when it comes to radiological hazards.
Then they point to Fukushima, which was the result of a one-in-a-thousand-years earthquake and tsunami, and it was also handled appropriately because we now know what the fuck we are doing with nuclear power and have learned a lot from our past mistakes. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong but I don't believe anyone in Japan fucking died either as a result of the radiological hazard of Fukushima - people were evacuated immediately. Modern nuclear reactors are incredibly safe, especially in non-retarded regions like the U.S, much of Europe and Japan. I wouldn't have a single fucking problem living right smack-dab next to a nuclear power plant, other than maybe the smokestacks are pretty ugly - but so are wind turbines and massive fields of solar panels, both of which accumulate mounds of dead birds around them.
Of course the waste disposal shit always gets brought up by the anti-nuclear retards, but that's a solved problem too - dig a big hole in the fucking desert, encase the spent material in concrete, put said concrete cask in the big hole in the fucking desert, put signs up around the big hole in the fucking desert that tell people to stay away from said big hole. Done and dusted, no big deal. Hell, we may not even need to dig the big hole, there are plenty of disused mines and such to be used for this purpose. As reactors get more and more efficient, there will also be even less waste to contend with and worry about, so at some point it would basically become a non-problem.
It is fucking infuriating how we have squandered atomic power. Literally all of our energy woes and most of our environmental fears could be solved in one fell swoop if we utilized nuclear power. These problems would be non-existent by now if we had not listened to these retards and immediately spun up nuclear reactors every other month, starting in the 50s and 60s, which is precisely what we should have been doing. Instead we're still on the petroleum crack pipe. Germany took all of their reactors offline in favor of sucking down Russian oil and gas, even though they know full-well that doing so is lining their war chest, which nominally the German government is supposed to oppose. And while we've squandered it for more than half a century, the next best time to start is NOW! But there is a shit-ton of money flowing into the pockets of anti-nuclear orgs and "non-proliferation" retards, so I doubt we'll be putting down the oil/natgas crack pipe any time soon, and it's a shame. It's so fucking irritating to see all of these people going on about "clean energy" while ignoring the most efficient, safe and cleanest energy possible - nuclear. They go on about inefficient bullshit like turbines and solar but if you mention "hey maybe we should build a fucking nuke plant!" their eyes roll back in their head and they go into hysterics about how scary it is. Unironically, if we started building nuke plants tomorrow, using solar/wind/geothermal and hydroelectric as a stop-gap fill-in measure or a supplement, we could solve literally every single energy problem within the next twenty five years or so. It wouldn't be instant and monetarily it would be a huge investment, but there's no time like the present and it would save so much trouble in the future.
Anyway, I also think that the risks of nuclear propulsion are overstated - I don't truly believe that it's as much of an earth-rending event as people claim if a nuclear-powered spacecraft were to disassemble itself during launch, reentry or in LEO, but it is a risk to some extent. But it's not as if we're using fucking cobalt in these reactors and overall, I believe that it's worth it. We might have to build launch sites that are more so in the middle of fucking nowhere to avoid localized risks [but we kinda already do that anyway, largely we build launch complexes where nobody lives, and there are risks present in modern rocketry as well, as demonstrated by China dropping SRBs on people's heads with residual, hilariously toxic oxidizers in them] but it's really the only way forward. Purely electronic propulsion is also feasible but while, in theory, you could have nearly infinite delta-V from such a set-up if we make leaps in solar efficiency/RTGs or fuel cells, it doesn't have the thrust/specific impulse to get anywhere too quickly and it would be extremely infeasible for manned spaceflight given the timeframes involved. Even if we theoretically accomplished effectively infinite delta-V from purely electronic propulsion, unless we figure out stasis/human cryogenics, by the time the craft were to reach its destination, all of the astronauts would be dead from old age or other causes. At the current time I don't think stasis is even remotely plausible and they've been trying to figure out how to make someone into a popsicle without destroying cells for decades and it's never worked, even though rich guys will still pay a bundle for them to keep their desiccated corpse on ice for a couple decades until the company shuts down and throws the husks in a mass grave. We're a long ways off from Futurama cryo tubes.
It's frustrating because in terms both of nuclear power and more effective, efficient spaceflight propulsion, we've basically been on the cusp of accomplishing it for decades now, my entire fucking life I've been told that all of this cool shit is just around the corner, yet we're still fucking waiting for it to come to fruition. We've been "almost there" for so long at this point, it's like a never-ending case of space blue balls. I want to see a fucking person on Mars, an airship in the atmosphere of Venus, drilling probes on Europa [probably where we will actually find extraterrestrial life], rovers on Titan - before I am fucking dead and in the ground. And we are progressing toward it, but not at a satisfactory rate. There's so much cool shit out there just waiting for us to find it and photograph it from ten different angles. And all my life it's been "right around the corner", with all of these neat "artists rendition/rendering" of cool shit happening or neat new spacecraft, and it just makes the blue balls exponentially worse. And it's even more frustrating when you consider what we've been spending all of this time, money and resources on instead - propping up all of these third world shitholes populated by people who have not managed to form a functioning civilization after thousands of fucking years. So on and so forth.
Also the fact that ALL of this is reliant mostly on political will - and that once we get another Democrat in office, they'll probably fucking nix all of this shit out of spite toward the Bad Orange Man, is doubly infuriating. Honest to God if we had simply continued on-pace from the Apollo program, I genuinely fucking think we could have had a manned Mars landing by the late 80s. It's so fucking sad that nobody seems to fucking care about this stuff, our fate is in the stars, the absolute pinnacle of human achievement and most John Q. Publics out there don't even fucking care. Looking at all of the canceled NASA proposals and projects over the years makes one want to weep.
Basically, this:
Tl;DR - nuclear power good, I love nuclear power, fucking build nuke plants and nuclear propulsion systems, seriously fucking do it.
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