Opening the Next Frontier
by Anthony Tate

Part 5: Dealing with the Devil


What is the Devil? Well, it's everybody's favorite villain, nuclear power.

Oooh, scary, isn't it?

Nuclear power has gotten a terribly bad reputation. According to the press you read, it is dangerous, poisonous, pollutes the Earth, kills bunnies, and generally is Bad. Why, oh why, would anyone even consider using such a terrible thing?

Because it is very, very powerful, like any terrible thing should be.

Remember, chemistry is failing us here. Chemical rockets are just about as powerful right now as they are ever going to get. We have two options for going out into the rich bounty of space. We wait a very, very long time for metastable propellants to finally be developed. Or we use our shiny new technology to tame that nuclear Devil and put it to work. Kind of like fire.

A few words about nuclear power and radiation. Despite all the bad press, nuclear power has killed almost no one compared to risks that we take without thought every day.

Yes, Chernobyl was a very bad accident. But bad accidents happen all the time, and are often much, much worse than Chernobyl was.

For example, Bhopal, India, makes Chernobyl pale in comparison, but we don't stop using all chemicals. According to the UN, burning coal kills 2 million people a year in India. For that matter, burning coal in the United States belches thousands of pounds of Uranium into the air you are breathing right now, millions of times more radiation than nuclear power plants do.

As for nuclear power plants: Every nuclear power plant in the United States was designed decades ago. We have put more effort into building better cars than we have into building better nuclear power plants. Compare the safety, comfort, and efficiency of a car today to a car in the 1960's. Air bags? Seat belts? Anti-lock brakes? Traction-control? Engine control computers? Air conditioning? Remember when cars had manual chokes? How about dieseling? Kids today don't even know what 'pre-detonation' means, much less why its bad for a car. In other words, we could do much better with nuclear today if we wanted to.

I think the Cold War scares about nuclear bombs were the worst, though. Don't get me wrong, nuclear bombs are very scary things, but they are not the only use of nuclear power. We have been throwing out the baby with the bathwater for many, many years. It's time to be sensible about nuclear power. Given that the young people in America these days seem much less timid than their 'counterculture' parents were, I think we can finally look at nuclear power with honest eyes, not ones clouded with irrational fears.

Now, as it turns out, the smart and brave folks who built the Saturn V also knew that they were using the best chemical fuels we were likely to see for a very long time, so they experimented with nuclear powered rockets. They made tests of solid cored nuclear rockets using pure hydrogen as fuel. The NERVA and ROVER programs were only two that experimented with this sort of concept, and even using the primitive means available 40 years ago, the rockets they built were twice as efficient as the best chemical fuels we use today.

That sturdy foundation is what will take us to space for real this time.

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Contents:

1: The Frontier Spirit

2: What went wrong.

3: Where do we go next?

4: So, why aren't we going?

5: Dealing with the Devil

6: A brief technical interlude

7: So how good is Nuclear, anyway?

8: Heat, temperature, and cooling.

9: But isn't this dangerous?

10: Prometheus would be proud of us.

11: Ok, that all sounds nice, but this is just fantasy, right?

12: But isn't this just too big?

13: But doesn't this thing make nuclear waste?

14: Conclusions