this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2024
986 points (86.5% liked)

Science Memes

11217 readers
2606 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.



Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

If something is Nuclear enough it can generate heat

That's an extreme oversimplification. RTGs don't use nuclear waste. Spent reactor fuel still emits a large amount of gamma and neutron radiation, but not with enough intensity to be useful in a reactor. The amount of shielding required makes any kind of non-terrestrial application impossible.

The most common RTG fuel is plutonium (^238^Pu, usually as PuO~2~), which emits mostly alpha and beta particles, and can be used with minimal shielding. It can't be produced by reprocessing spent reactor fuel. In 2024, only Russia is manufacturing it. Polonium (^210^Po) is also an excellent fuel with a very high energy density, but it has a prohibitively short half-life of just over a hundred days. It also has to be manufactured and can't be extracted.

^90^Sr (strontium) can be extracted from nuclear fuel, and was used by early Soviet RTGs, but only terrestrially because the gamma emission requires heavy shielding. Strontium is also a very reactive alkaline metal. It isn't used as RTG fuel today.