A New Kind of a Russian Nuclear Reactor Link to my article: h t t p: / /csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/cf/reactor419.html Feel free to share it with all who might be interested, especially with students. Ludwik Kowalski, Ph.D.
How much radiation was emitted? And of what kind? Has anything been replicated by others? These are basic questions.
Just sounds like a variation of Rossi's E-Cat. Instead of hydrogen you have lithium aluminum hydride, which easily produces hydrogen in a reaction with water (along with a lot of heat). Rossi's device has never been independently reviews and he was denied a US patent on the basis of the device being "inoperable".
A ground-breaking Russian nuclear space-travel propulsion system will be ready by 2017 and will power a ship capable of long-haul interplanetary missions by 2025, giving Russia a head start in the outer-space race. The megawatt-class nuclear drive will function for up to three years and produce 100-150 kilowatts of energy at normal capacity. The new project proposes the use of an electric ion propulsion system. The engines exhaust thrust will be generated by an ion flow, which is further accelerated by an electric field. The nuclear reactor will therefore “supply” the necessary amount of electric power without unwanted radioactive contamination of the environment. Xenon will serve as propellant for the engines. It is under development at Skolkovo, Russia’s technology innovation hub, whose nuclear cluster head Denis Kovalevich confirmed the breakthrough to Interfax. "At present we are testing several types of fuel and later we will start drafting the design," he said. While the engine is expected to be fully assembled by 2017 the accompanying craft will not be ready before 2025 former head of Roscosmos, Anatoly Perminov, told Interfax. Scientists expect to start putting the new engine through its paces in operational tests as early as 2014. The Russian government began the ambitious project in 2010 with an investment of approximately $17 million dollars and is expected to shell out $247 million over the next five years to complete the engine. Contractors: NIKIET (Research and Design Institute of Power Engineering, open joint-stock company, subsidiary of Russia’s state-run nuclear corporation Rosatom) – main design office for the reactor Energia (Korolyov Rocket and Space Corporation) Kurchatov Institute (National Research Centre) Keldysh Research Center (Federal State Unitary Enterprise) Funds: Total cost of nuclear propulsion system: over US $247 million Total project budget: over US $580 million through 2019 The idea of using a nuclear propulsion system to power space missions is not altogether new. It came about in the 1960s and was the brainchild of three Russian academics, Mstislav Keldysh, Igor Kurchatov and Sergey Korolev in the Soviet Union. Research into the field was subsequently carried out not only in the Soviet Union, but also in the US, although with a view to creating a new weapon rather than the advancement of space travel. The stumbling block that has faced scientists over the last couple of years is that as a craft travels further away from the sun’s rays, solar energy weakens and cannot produce the necessary energy to power electric engines through its solar panels. Nuclear power has generally been considered a valid alternative to fossil fuels to power space craft, as it is the only energy source capable of producing the enormous thrust needed for interplanetary travel. NASA embarked on a project to develop a nuclear engine capable of powering a space craft, but funding was cut in 2003. The revolutionary propulsion system falls in line with recently announced plans for Russia to conquer space. Last month, the Russian Federal Space Agency released its ambitious scheme to explore our solar system in the coming years. Entitled Space Development Strategies up to 2030, Russia aims to send probes to Mars, Jupiter, and Venus, as well as establish a series of bases on the moon.
The source for Fallen's post is this http://rt.com/news/space-nuclear-engine-propulsion-120/. Just look at the date of the article (3 years ago) and other news stories from that site and no more needs to be said.
Dr. Kowalski... you write: Have you read much about the Stanley Meyer hydrogen fuel vehicle? Do you think that it was astonishing that an American judge would allow a white substance to be added to fuel for the Stanley Meyer vehicle even though the fuel is supposed to be tap water? Would you say that both Stanley Meyer as well as Alexander Parkhomov may be suffering from the same type of bias against extremely promising new sources of energy? Is is just my imagination...... or is it ridiculous for a judge to have allowed a white substance to have been added to the Stanley Meyer engine? My apologies if comparing these two cases is not one of the possible directions that you had planned for this discussion to go in! http://www.electro-tech-online.com/threads/stanley-meyers-and-zero-point-energy.42388/
Hall thrusters were studied independently in the United States and the Soviet Union. They were first described publicly in the US in the early 1960s.However, the Hall thruster was first developed into an efficient propulsion device in the Soviet Union. In the US, scientists focused instead on developing gridded ion thrusters. Two types of Hall thrusters were developed in the Soviet Union: ♢thrusters with wide acceleration zone, SPT-Stationary Plasma Thruster at Design Bureau Fakel ♢thrusters with narrow acceleration zone, DAS (TAL, Thruster with Anode Layer), at the Central Research Institute for Machine Building (TsNIIMASH). It's not like this technology isn't being used now. Russia pioneered it a long time ago and its a lead being used on some satellites. NASAs engine test The SPT design was largely the work of A. I. Morozov. The first SPT to operate in space, an SPT-50 aboard a Soviet Meteor spacecraft, was launched December 1971. They were mainly used for satellite stabilization in North-South and in East-West directions. Since then until the late 1990s 118 SPT engines completed their mission and some 50 continued to be operated. Thrust of the first generation of SPT engines, SPT-50 and SPT-60 was 20 and 30 mN respectively. In 1982, SPT-70 and SPT-100 were introduced, their thrusts being 40 and 83 mN, respectively. In the post-Soviet Russia high-power (a few kilowatts) SPT-140, SPT-160, SPT-200, T-160 and low-power (less than 500 W) SPT-35 were introduced. Soviet and Russian TAL-type thrusters include the D-38, D-55, D-80, and D-100. Soviet-built thrusters were introduced to the West in 1992 after a team of electric propulsion specialists from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Glenn Research Center, and the Air Force Research Laboratory, under the support of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, visited Russian laboratories and experimentally evaluated the SPT-100 (i.e., a 100 mm diameter SPT thruster). Over 200 Hall thrusters have been flown on Soviet/Russian satellites in the past thirty years. No failures have ever occurred on orbit. Hall thruster continue to be used on Russian spacecraft and have also flown on European and American spacecraft. Space Systems/Loral, an American commercial satellite manufacturer, now flies Fakel SPT-100's on their GEO communications spacecraft. Since their introduction to the west in the early 1990s, Hall thrusters have been the subject of a large number of research efforts throughout the United States, France, Italy, Japan, and Russia (with many smaller efforts scattered in various countries across the globe). Hall thruster research in the US is conducted at several government laboratories, universities and private companies. Government and government funded centers include NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA's Glenn Research Center, the Air Force Research Laboratory (Edwards AFB, CA), and The Aerospace Corporation. Universities include the US Air Force Institute of Technology, University of Michigan, Stanford University, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, Michigan Technological University, and Georgia Tech. A considerable amount of development is being conducted in industry, such as Aerojet and Busek in the USA, SNECMA in France and in Italy. The first use of Hall thrusters on lunar orbit was the European Space Agency (ESA) lunar mission SMART-1 in 2003. On a western satellite Hall thrusters were first demonstrated on the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) STEX spacecraft, which flew the Russian D-55. The first American Hall thruster to fly in space was the Busek BHT-200 on TacSat-2 technology demonstration spacecraft. The first flight of an American Hall thruster on an operational mission, was the Aerojet BPT-4000, which launched August 2010 on the military Advanced Extremely High Frequency GEO communications satellite. At 4.5 kW, the BPT-4000 is also the highest power Hall thruster ever flown in space. Besides the usual stationkeeping tasks, the BPT-4000 is also providing orbit raising capability to the spacecraft. Several countries worldwide continue efforts to qualify Hall thruster technology for commercial uses. /////////////////////// All russia is doing is upgrading it's current design to be more efficient and powerful using nuclear energy
