NASA Wants to Send Nuclear Rockets to the Moon and Mars

NASA Wants to Send Nuclear Rockets to the Moon and Mars

NASA could place human missions to the moon or Mars in political jeopardy if it opts to use highly-enriched uranium as a power source in space, warns a leading  specialist on nuclear proliferation.

A nuclear rocket engine would be twice as efficient as the chemical engines powering rockets today.At the center of NASA’s nuclear rocket program is Bill Emrich, the man who literally wrote the book on nuclear propulsion. “You can do chemical propulsion to Mars, but it’s really hard,” says Emrich. “Going further than the moon is much better with nuclear propulsion.” That’s another topic we want to examine at the symposium. The claim from some in NASA … is that this type of reactor for use on the surface of a planetary body … would be much heavier if it used low-enriched uranium rather than highly-enriched uranium. They say the reactor core would require much more uranium and that therefore the core would be bigger, therefore the whole reactor would be heavier. They say this would either increase launch costs or it might even preclude the ability to launch the reactor into space. That’s the claim. The question is: is that claim true or not?

What we’re going to have at the event is a professor who published a recent article in an academic journal that looks at weight differences between a highly-enriched uranium and low-enriched uranium reactor. He found that, while a low-enriched uranium reactor would be somewhat heavier, it’s not much heavier. … [There’s] maybe twice as much uranium, but uranium is not actually the main weight in the reactor. It’s the other parts that shield the reactor and that convert the heat from the reactor into electricity. So even if you double the weight of the uranium, you’re not doubling weight of reactor. You’re marginally increasing it.

NASA is working on two kinds of reactors. One is on the planet’s surface to provide power and electricity for a base. They’re also working on nuclear propulsion to power a rocket to get there. Those [propulsion] reactors are designed to use low-enriched uranium, so they are not controversial from a proliferation standpoint.