Mining fisionables off-Earth: where?

My attempts at searching on the subject have thus-far been cluttered
to uselessness with UFO/nut-sites, so, in the spirit of the Lunar
aluminum thread, I thought I'd try asking the group-mind.

Large-scale exploration/development in space pretty much requires
nuclear power, but launching large chunks of uranium and plutonium
into space is, politically anyway, problematic. One obvious work
around is to develop a nuclear industry off-Earth somewhere, one of
those things far easier said than done.

First question: where do you mine the stuff?
Second question: where (and how) do you enrich the uranium into
something useful?

The Moon? At least one document I found on the web suggests the Moon
has plenty of uranium, but I'm not feeling optimistic that it will be
in any form that's easy to mine and refine. Any info? The Moon is
conveniently located and (relatively) easily accessible by chemical
propulsion while you're getting things up and running, but it isn't as
easy to work there as it would first appear.

Beyond that, I don't know. Mercury? A base near the poles might be
doable, and have access to lots of solar power for mining/enrichment,
but is there likely to be anything worth mining/enriching? The
asteroids? Mars? The Martian moons? I suspect anything further out
in the solar system is too far and energy starved to boot-strap
without launching plenty of nuclear material from Earth first.

How about enrichment/development? How do you do it with minimal mass
launched from Earth, and boot-strap it into a self-sustaining system?
(That is, you're creating enough fissionables to cover any necessary
power/propulsion requirements for the system, with a surplus for other
uses).
-------------------------------------------------
J. Steven York's Multiplex of the Mind
http://member.newsguy.com/~jsteven/

J. Steven York wrote:

Large-scale exploration/development in space pretty much requires
nuclear power, but launching large chunks of uranium and plutonium
into space is, politically anyway, problematic. One obvious work
around is to develop a nuclear industry off-Earth somewhere, one of
those things far easier said than done.

It's a completely stupid idea, political problems or not. The mass
of the machinery you'd have to lift is far higher than the mass of
fissionable materials you could hope to produce with it.

What's wrong with launching moderately enriched uranium, anyway?

Paul

"Paul F. Dietz" wrote in message
...
J. Steven York wrote:

Large-scale exploration/development in space pretty much requires
nuclear power, but launching large chunks of uranium and plutonium
into space is, politically anyway, problematic. One obvious work
around is to develop a nuclear industry off-Earth somewhere, one of
those things far easier said than done.

It's a completely stupid idea, political problems or not. The mass
of the machinery you'd have to lift is far higher than the mass of
fissionable materials you could hope to produce with it.

What's wrong with launching moderately enriched uranium, anyway?

Challenger, Columbia, Delta II, Delta III etc, ad infinitum. Simple answer
to a simple (and overly simplistic) question.

--
Alan Erskine
We can get people to the Moon in five years,
not the fifteen GWB proposes.
Give NASA a real challenge

In article ,
J. Steven York wrote:
Large-scale exploration/development in space pretty much requires
nuclear power, but launching large chunks of uranium and plutonium
into space is, politically anyway, problematic...

The difficulties are exaggerated. Note that the last time such issues
came up, with Cassini, the protests were really quite feeble. And that
was a more difficult case; RTGs, by their nature, have to be somewhat
exposed, while fissionable materials could be launched in heavy protective
containers.

One obvious work
around is to develop a nuclear industry off-Earth somewhere, one of
those things far easier said than done.

Quite so.

First question: where do you mine the stuff?

Depends on where you can find decent uranium ore. That's still very much
an unknown. Even for the Moon, we more or less understand its average
geology but know little about its extremes.... and ore bodies are, by
definition, extreme cases. The odds may be a bit better on Mars, which
had liquid water for a while at one time -- many of the more familiar
ore-forming processes need water -- or on Mercury, which appears to have a
thin crust and a large core and might have more heavy metals close to the
surface.

The asteroids, including the Martian moons, are unpromising -- not enough
geological evolution to separate and concentrate materials -- although we
don't understand them well enough to entirely rule them out yet.

Second question: where (and how) do you enrich the uranium into
something useful?

Where you find it is the most obvious place. Beyond that, as O'Neill
pointed out, for almost anything industrial you want to be in open space,
not on the surface of a planet, because the environment is more
controllable.

How about enrichment/development? How do you do it with minimal mass
launched from Earth, and boot-strap it into a self-sustaining system?

Uranium enrichment isn't a simple business no matter how you slice it.
This isn't something you can bootstrap with a small initial investment.

Possibly the simplest way to turn natural uranium into high-grade
fissionables is to burn it in molten-salt reactors, which can (at least in
principle) do continuous extraction of the generated plutonium from the
circulating fuel stream, avoiding some of the awkwardness of having to
process spent fuel rods. Even this isn't a simple or easily bootstrapped
operation.
--
MOST launched 30 June; science observations running | Henry Spencer
since Oct; first surprises seen; papers pending. |

"Alan Erskine" writes:

"Paul F. Dietz" wrote in message
...

It's a completely stupid idea, political problems or not. The mass
of the machinery you'd have to lift is far higher than the mass of
fissionable materials you could hope to produce with it.

What's wrong with launching moderately enriched uranium, anyway?

Challenger, Columbia, Delta II, Delta III etc, ad infinitum. Simple answer
to a simple (and overly simplistic) question.

We already know how to harden the containers of such materials so that
they survive re-entry and surface impact intact. Even in a luanch
accident, you wouldn't have a problem. This non-issue comes up every
time anything "nuclear" gets launched.

http://pub97.ezboard.com/fnuclearspa...opicID=6.topic

Here is a list of the failures (and successes) when launching
"nuclear" materials.

http://www.skyrocket.de/space/doc_sat/nuclear.htm

Note that the worst of these are the Soviet reactor accidents. The
design of their system was very bad, from a safety point of view. The
design relied on separating the reactor and boosting it into a high
"disposal" orbit.

The US philosphy is to encase the material such that any accident will
not release material.

Jeff
--
Remove "no" and "spam" from email address to reply.
If it says "This is not spam!", it's surely a lie.

Alan Erskine wrote:

"Paul F. Dietz" wrote in message
...
J. Steven York wrote:

Large-scale exploration/development in space pretty much requires
nuclear power, but launching large chunks of uranium and plutonium
into space is, politically anyway, problematic. One obvious work
around is to develop a nuclear industry off-Earth somewhere, one of
those things far easier said than done.

It's a completely stupid idea, political problems or not. The mass
of the machinery you'd have to lift is far higher than the mass of
fissionable materials you could hope to produce with it.

What's wrong with launching moderately enriched uranium, anyway?

Challenger, Columbia, Delta II, Delta III etc, ad infinitum. Simple answer
to a simple (and overly simplistic) question.

But that does NOT answer the question. What's wrong with launching
moderately enriched uranium?

--
Scott Lowther, Engineer
Remove the obvious (capitalized) anti-spam
gibberish from the reply-to e-mail address

Henry Spencer wrote:

The asteroids, including the Martian moons, are unpromising -- not enough
geological evolution to separate and concentrate materials

An important technology for the future will be a universal elemental
separator. Basicall, a box you feed rocks into, that separates all the
elements within. Such a technology will be vital come the time of
asteroidal/cometary industry and colonization.

--
Scott Lowther, Engineer
Remove the obvious (capitalized) anti-spam
gibberish from the reply-to e-mail address

"Scott Lowther" wrote in message
...

An important technology for the future will be a universal elemental
separator. Basicall, a box you feed rocks into, that separates all the
elements within. Such a technology will be vital come the time of
asteroidal/cometary industry and colonization.

Peter Schubert discusses his proposals for such a technology he
http://www.spacemanufacture.com/

--


Regards,
Mike Combs
----------------------------------------------------------------------
We should ask, critically and with appeal to the numbers, whether the
best site for a growing advancing industrial society is Earth, the
Moon, Mars, some other planet, or somewhere else entirely.
Surprisingly, the answer will be inescapable - the best site is
"somewhere else entirely."

Gerard O'Neill - "The High Frontier"

Alan Erskine wrote:

What's wrong with launching moderately enriched uranium, anyway?


Challenger, Columbia, Delta II, Delta III etc, ad infinitum. Simple answer
to a simple (and overly simplistic) question.

A simple non sequitur, actually. What do you imagine would have
happened to moderately enriched uranium in a launch accident?
At *best*, there might be a criticality accident if it just happened
to come down intact in fresh water (chlorine absorbs neutrons,
so seawater won't do), but even that wouldn't have major effects
since the fuel would be blown apart, and could be avoided by
inclusion of neutron poisons in the payload.

Paul

Henry Spencer wrote:

The difficulties are exaggerated. Note that the last time such issues
came up, with Cassini, the protests were really quite feeble. And that
was a more difficult case; RTGs, by their nature, have to be somewhat
exposed, while fissionable materials could be launched in heavy protective
containers.

Moreover, the RTGs are orders of magnitude more radioactive than uranium
(even pure 235U).

Paul