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Same Nuclear Engine That Powers Mars Rover Was to Power Artificial Hearts or was PU238 prioritised by NASA!

“I’m fully confident that we will be able to continue this, and ultimately have plutonium produced in this country again in kilogram quantities, on an annual basis,” he added.
 
The goal is to eventually produce between 3.3 pounds and 4.4 pounds (1.5 to 2 kg) of plutonium-238 per year, which should be enough to support NASA’s robotic planetary science missions, Dudzinsky said.

Gene Ostrovsky on Mar 25, 2013 • 11:44 am

uranium powered artificial heart Same Nuclear Engine That Powers Mars Rover Was to Power Artificial Hearts

Behold the boldest medical steampunk from yesterday’s bright future. Courtesy of the National Heart Institute and the Atomic Energy Agency, and in a story relayed by Shelley McKellar in journal Technology and Culture, two parallel projects between 1967 and 1977 were attempting to design a nuclear powered artificial heart.

Using essentially the same radioisotope thermoelectric generator engine technology that powers NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover, a mechanical heart may be made to power the human body for many years without swapping out the batteries. But plutonium-238, sadly, has other uses such as terrorism, making the thought of such devices a pipe dream for today’s future.

Study abstract in Technology and Culture: Negotiating Risk: The Failed Development of Atomic Hearts in America, 1967-1977

More at The Atlantic: The True Story of the Government Programs That Tried to Build an Atomic Heart

http://www.medgadget.com/2013/03/same-nuclear-engine-that-powers-mars-rover-was-to-power-artificial-hearts.html

Plutonium-238: Spacecraft fuel shortage may have been averted

NASA officials have said there’s enough of the isotope left to fuel space missions through around 2020.

By

Mike Wall, SPACE.com
Sun, Apr 08 2012 at 3:13 PM
 
The United States hasn’t produced plutonium-238 — a radioactive isotope that’s been powering NASA space probes for five decades — since the late 1980s, and planetary scientists say stockpiles are worryingly low. But a production restart is now underway, say officials with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), which supplies plutonium-238 to the space agency.
 
“We have turned the spade in starting the project for renewed plutonium production,” Wade Carroll, DOE’s deputy director of space and defense power systems, said in March at the Nuclear and Emerging Technologies for Space (NETS) conference in The Woodlands, Texas. “It’ll take probably five or six years before the next new plutonium is available.”
 
….For the past several years, both NASA and the DOE have asked for money to fund a restart. They estimate it’ll cost between $75 million and $90 million over five years, and the two agencies want to split the costs (since the DOE makes the stuff and NASA uses it).
 
Congress has given NASA some money — $10 million both last year and this year, for example. But lawmakers have denied the DOE’s funding request for three years in a row, Carroll said…..
 
…..”I’m fully confident that we will be able to continue this, and ultimately have plutonium produced in this country again in kilogram quantities, on an annual basis,” he added.
 
The goal is to eventually produce between 3.3 pounds and 4.4 pounds (1.5 to 2 kg) of plutonium-238 per year, which should be enough to support NASA’s robotic planetary science missions, Dudzinsky said….
 

 

 

March 26, 2013 - Posted by | Uncategorized

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