Sciencetits
I hope this isn’t how we refer to women in science.
(Ps you can edit titles on Lemmy)
It sounds like we’re staring to catch up to the Fallout universe.
It would be nice to have one of those nuclear potatoes to run my house.
Instead of using this on the moon, what is preventing us from putting this power source in a car and either powering the motor or constantly charging a battery?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Bangor University has designed nuclear fuel cells, the size of poppy seeds, to produce the energy needed to sustain life there.
As space technology advances at a rapid pace, the BBC was given exclusive access to the Bangor University Nuclear Futures Institute’s laboratory.
The Bangor team, which is a world leader on fuels, works with partners such as Rolls Royce, the UK Space Agency, Nasa and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US.
Earlier this month, India made a historic landing near the Moon’s south pole with its robotic probe Chandrayaan-3.
One of the mission’s major goals is to hunt for water-based ice which, scientists say, could support human habitation on the Moon in future.
The geopolitical author and journalist, Tim Marshall, said the breakthrough over fuel was a step towards a global race to the lunar south pole.
The original article contains 778 words, the summary contains 140 words. Saved 82%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is a bit of a tangent, but the damage that bigotry has done to human progress is staggering. The scientist leading the team is apparently a black Zimbabwean woman. Not so long ago, it would have been impossible for someone like that to lead a team, and that immense talent would have gone entirely to waste.
Think of all the highly intelligent people who were unable to go to university or perform to the best of their abilities because some racist moron assumed they were too stupid. Think of all the women who are scared off pursuing a scientific career to sexist BS.
Think how (overeducated) morons still run entire countries or huge companies, thanks to privilege they don’t deserve, while at least one of the cleaners is twice as smart and a better human being than they’ll ever be.
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” - Stephen Jay Gould
https://mastodon.social/@jenbanim@mastodo.neoliber.al/111021059217957193
This thread is talking about the fact that 15-20% of the economic gains of the last 60 years or so are the result of decreasing acceptance of overt bigotry in the workplace.
The reason cited for nuclear propulsion enabling us to get to places like Mars faster is wrong. It’s not the amount of thrust, but the ability to use constant thrust longer (because we can fuel longer burns). It’s why the plot device of the Epstein drive in The Expanse opened up the whole solar system - they can do a burn for days and use up very little fuel. We’re nowhere near that, but nuclear would be far better than conventional rockets that have very limited burn time plus have heavy fuel to carry with them.
the Epstein drive
Very unfortunate name
Plus, I suppose that the small size of the payload will make the potential for widespread radiation poisoning lower in case of an accident.
Small reactors often don’t actually have enough fuel to actually melt their containment. And I’m talking Small Modular Reactors in the low MW range.
These pellets would be basically immune to anything even resembling a meltdown unless you had hundreds of them in one space.
No, the risk when dealing with items this small is orphan source. i.e. the loss of a pellet into the wider world.
Orphan source accidents are terrifying but also of very small scale. Usually one or two people who don’t know what they’ve found and lose body parts to it, or just die.
Orphan sources are almost always from improperly disposed of medical equipment. Including the single worst case I can think of.
