NASA Fuel Shortage: Will Plutonium Scarcity End Deep-Space Exploration By 2020?

 

Excerpt from isciencetimes.com

A plutonium pellet, the fuel that keeps NASA space exploration going. (Photo: Creative Commons)

NASA is running out of fuel. According to Wired, the nation’s civilian space program is dangerously low on plutonioum-238, a radioactive isotope that NASA uses to power its space probe missions. In fact, its current stockpile will last only until about 2020.  

Exactly how much plutonium-238 does NASA have in its storehouse? Yahoo reports that the government program has just 36 pounds left.

That might sound like a lot — or a little, depending on how familiar

you are with plutonium-238 — but consider that a single plutonium-238

battery, like the one currently fueling the space program’s Mars

Curiosity rover, contains about 10 pounds of the isotope.

Plutonium-238 is an extremely efficient — but extremely expensive —

fuel source. The isotope is made in a nuclear reactor, and can produce

small quantities of electricity consistently for several decades. A

single gram, or about .002 pounds, of plutonium-238 can produce .5 watts

of power. A 10-pound chunk of plutonium can produce about 2,268 watts

of power.

As the isotope breaks down, or decays, it releases energy. So much

energy, in fact, that its temperature can reach 2,300 degrees

Fahrenheit. A plutonium-238 battery is rigged in a way that turns this

heat into power. This is called a radioisotope thermoelectric generator,

or RTG.

“It’s like a magic isotope. It’s just right,” Jim Adams, NASA’s deputy chief technologist, told Wired.

There used to be a ton of it in space — it was the product of

exploding stars — but that was billions of years ago. The isotope’s

half-life, the time it takes for half of the material to decay, is about

88 years. So it’s long gone by now.  

According to NPR, plutonium-238 batteries have powered about two dozen space missions

since NASA’s inception. That includes the Voyager probes in the 1970s

(one of which recently exited our solar system), the Cassini spacecraft

and the Mars Curiosity rover. It’s even used in spy satellites.

But the plutonium-238 won’t last forever.

“We’ve been living off of the material that we had produced up until

that time, and if you keep using material and you have a finite supply,

eventually you run out, and that’s where we are right now,” Ralph

McNutt, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied

Physics Laboratory, told NPR in 2009.

Until recently, the U.S. hasn’t made plutonium since the 1980s. 
They

originally made it as a byproduct of Cold War activities. And after the

U.S. stopped manufacturing the isotope, it started buying it from

Russia. Their first shipment to the states was in 1993. It weighed 36

pounds and cost the U.S. $45,000 per ounce, or roughly $26 million for

the whole batch. But that market shuttered in 2009.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. government has 87 pounds of plutonium-238 to divvy up between its departments. Two-thirds of it goes to national security projects. NASA gets just 36 of it.

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NASA Fuel Shortage: Will Plutonium Scarcity End Deep-Space Exploration By 2020?