In 2005, Huygens was deployed to the surface of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. Named after astronomers Giovanni Cassini and Christiaan Huygens, the pair of spacecraft reached Saturn in 2004 after a 2.2-billion-mile (3.5-billion-kilometer) voyage. 15, 1997, with the European Space Agency’s Huygens probe. In a nuclear power station nuclear fuel undergoes a controlled chain reaction in the reactor to produce heat - nuclear to. The iridium cladding around that precious nuclear fuel was produced by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Y-12 National Security Complex.Ĭassini launched on Oct. The main nuclear fuels are uranium and plutonium. One solution under consideration is to recycle the plutonium. Weapons-grade plutonium is produced in special reactors to give >90 Pu-239, reactor-grade plutonium contains about 30 non-fissile isotopes. It has several isotopes, some of which are fissile and some of which undergo spontaneous fission, releasing neutrons. Cassini’s RTGs contained plutonium from the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in Aiken, South Carolina. The unstable element, which will remain radioactive for millennia, is the residue of ill-fated efforts to recycle used nuclear fuel. Plutonium: A transuranic element, formed in a nuclear reactor by neutron capture. The only way to transform this heat into power is to inject fresh coolant into. RTGs are lightweight, compact spacecraft electrical power systems that have flown successfully on 23 previous U.S. How much heat is generated depends on the rate at which it burns Fissile Fuel. Contained within three cylindrical power sources called radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTG), they produced the heat and electricity that kept Cassini on track and responsive throughout its long journey. Those components were the iridium-clad pellets of plutonium-238 developed by the Department of Energy decades ago.
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