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Following on the House passage of his energy bill, the President is promoting nuclear power:

Speaking at a Small Business Administration conference, Bush hailed nuclear power as part of a long-term solution to the nation’s energy challenge and outlined plans to encourage construction of oil refineries and facilities for storing liquefied natural gas…

The Bush plan also calls for providing a new incentive to build nuclear power plants by reducing the “uncertainty in the licensing process” and providing “federal risk insurance to mitigate the additional cost of unforeseen delays.”
Industry analysts questioned whether this would be enough to spur construction. Investors have been leery of the upfront costs needed to build a nuclear plant compared with other forms of electricity production.

Of course, one has to wonder just how large a share of those offputting up-front costs are due to the licensing process itself, and to nuisance litigation by those opposed to nuclear power as such.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to be making the obvious tie-in to the so-called “hydrogen economy”. While I’m personally agnostic on the concept, it is a popular notion/fad, especially among those one would expect to express knee-jerk opposition to nuclear power. Even worse than missing a good marketing opportunity, Bush’s reference to hydrogen in tonight’s press conference described it as a source of energy, rather than an energy storage/delivery medium. Nuclear power would be an excellent means to produce hydrogen for other applications, since it doesn’t rely on the fossil fuels hydrogen is intended to supplant — making this connection (and clearing up what is a common misconception in the process) would do wonders for both ends.

(And another thing…does it make any economic sense at all to bump up tax incentives for people purchasing hybrid cars? It’s a supply rather than a demand problem — the incentives ought to be directed at automakers, to encourage them to increase the production of hybrids to meet market demand.)

Posted on April 28th, 2005 under Useful Technology. Comments: 2

It’s such a groovy idea, someone was eventually going to do it.

Posted on April 26th, 2005 under Miscellaneous. Comments Off

…is that it might well resemble NSF’s U.S. Antarctic Program.

I just finished reading the book associated with the website, likewise named Big Dead Place. While it’s quite funny at times, at other times it’s disturbing to see from an insider’s perspective just how dysfunctional such a program can be, and how disconnected from its purported purpose it really is.

Posted on April 24th, 2005 under Space Policy. Comments: 1

I fully expected that the energy bill passed today by the House would offer little in the way of nuclear energy promotion. But, there do seem to be some good items tucked away in the bill. (Note: the link is to a slow-loading 1.4M text file.)

• Section 629 calls for a report on the feasibility of developing commercial nuclear power facilities at existing DoE sites — which one might expect to take the wind out of NIMBY arguments.

• Section 638 creates a national low-enriched uranium stockpile, to be filled with home-grown LEU and “blended down” materials recovered from Russian weapons materials. Why do you suppose there would be a need for an LEU stockpile, unless…we were perhaps planning an expansion of nuclear power generation?
• Section 651 establishes a project to develop a new nuclear reactor design specifically geared towards the generation of hydrogen fuel — a project which those pushing for a “hydrogen economy” will no doubt get wholeheartedly behind…it’s a special gift from Congress just in time for Earth Day!
• Section 906 declares that it is “policy of the United States to conduct research, development, demonstration, and commercial application to provide for the scientific, engineering, and commercial infrastructure necessary to ensure that the United States is competitive with other nations in providing fusion energy for its own needs and the needs of other nations, including by demonstrating electric power or hydrogen production for the United States energy grid utilizing fusion energy at the earliest date possible”, and sets the terms for U.S. participation in ITER.
• Section 948 calls for a program to develop cleaner, safer fuel recycling technologies.
• Section 951 directs the Secretary of Energy to carry out the Nuclear Power 2010 program to develop fuel, fuel processing, and reactor technologies required to deploy new nuclear plants in the U.S. by 2010.
• Section 952 also directs the Secretary to develop a technology and R&D plan for evaluating next-generation nuclear power technologies.
• Interestingly, Section 958 actually calls for the construction of a next-generation nuclear power plant based on the research and development called for in the preceding sections:
  

  The program shall culminate in the construction and operation of the demonstration plant based on a design selected by the Secretary in accordance with procedures described in the plan required by section 960(c). The demonstration plant shall be located and constructed within the United States and shall be operational, and capable of demonstrating the commercial production of electricity, by December 31, 2015.

  Hmm…

With the ongoing program to develop new nuclear power sources for space applications, I’m mildly surprised that there wasn’t at least some mention of space nuclear power. But, I guess the fact that nuclear power is a part of the national energy policy at all is cause enough for celebration.

(The text can also be found at the Library of Congress’ Thomas server, conveniently indexed by section, but unfortunately the LoC has gone out of its way to avoid providing permanent links to the bills archived there.)

Posted on April 22nd, 2005 under Space Policy. Comments: 2

Orbital Recovery’s CX-OLEV “Space Tug” Passes Major Program Milestone

Mission modeling performed with simulators confirmed the CX-OLEV’s ability to carry out its high-value space servicing flights, including the precision approach and docking phase with telecommunications satellites.

The CX-OLEV will supply the propulsion, navigation and guidance to maintain valuable telecommunications satellites in their proper orbital slots for up to eight additional years.

And all this from a commercial European consortium, despite the fact that the EU is still holding high-level consultations on planning for a conference to discuss the terms for building consensus on evolving a process for developing a unified space policy. How do they manage without leadership from Brussels?

(Snarkiness aside, this is a promising development for European commercial space efforts.)

Posted on April 17th, 2005 under Space Commerce. Comments Off

The DART automated rendezvous technology demonstration spacecraft managed to sort-of rendezvous with its target satellite, but did not get within 17 feet of it as intended.

Good thing there’s a backup — XSS-11, a small spacecraft designed to perform similar rendezvous and proximity operations, was successfully launched on Monday. While having a slightly different focus, the XSS-11 project seems even more ambitious than DART:

During its mission, the XSS-11 craft will approach dead or unused US satellites or old rocket parts. At each rendezvous, the Air Force satellite will burn its engines to move around the object while taking a range of pictures.

Normally, ground controllers instruct a satellite when to fire its engines. But, after a commissioning and testing phase, XSS-11 will only take instruction on where to find a dead satellite. Then, with its on-board planner, it will calculate when to burn its engines…

During its lifetime, XSS-11 will rendezvous with six to eight objects, the first of which will probably be the upper stage of the Minotaur rocket that carried it into space. The Air Force wants to be able to service and inspect military satellites in space…

NASA is also interested in using such technology for a Mars-sample-return mission, so that a lander would be able to dock autonomously with a mother ship after a visit to the surface. Spacecraft autonomy is one of the requirements for President George W Bush?s plan for human missions to the Moon and Mars.

Not to mention the ability to autonomously assemble and resupply large spacecraft in orbit.

Naturally, since such a spacecraft can — like any tool — be used for destructive purposes, the development of such a capability is twisting knickers in certain quarters:

However, Theresa Hitchens, vice president for the Center for Defense Information, a think-tank in Washington, DC, says that the XSS-11 satellite could be the predecessor for a space-based weapon. If a micro-satellite could approach other satellites, she says, it could also adjust its speed and ram into the satellite, damaging it or knocking it off course. And smaller satellites are more difficult to detect from the ground. But officially, the US Air Force has no offensive satellite weapons program.

Like that’s a bad thing to have in the toolbox. Just wait until some rogue state knocks out their Link TV feed and see how quickly they change their tune.

Posted on April 17th, 2005 under Space Technology. Comments Off

Mark Whittington points out an interesting application of space imaging technology to archaeology.

For more than a century, it has caused excitement and frustration in equal measure – a collection of Greek and Roman writings so vast it could redraw the map of classical civilisation. If only it was legible.

Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.

In the past four days alone, Oxford’s classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament.

Recovery of ancient texts via infrared scanning — brought to you by the mad scientists of the dreaded Military Industrial Complex™!

(And is it just me, or is there a striking similarity between this story and the technical premise of James P. Hogan’s Inherit the Stars?)

Posted on April 17th, 2005 under Useful Technology. Comments Off

Bruce is complaining about nukes in space again.

Nothing much new to lampoon here, just the usual conspiracy mongering and allusions to unnamed alternatives to nuclear power for deep-space missions. However, I did notice a couple of factual errors in his letter.

Local police forces were heard on National Public Radio warning the public to stay away from Columbia debris and said they were told by NASA that “radioactive” sources were on-board that mission. Just what was the radioactive source on Columbia?

Local police may or may not have claimed that there was radioactive contamination in the Columbia wreckage, but according to NASA the only radioactive material of note aboard Columbia at the time of the wreck was the less than 11 total microcuries of Americium 242 in the orbiter’s onboard smoke detectors — not enough to have caused any illness or injury. What NASA was warning people about was the presence of residual hypergolics and other chemically toxic materials (and it’s entirely possible that even that danger was deliberately overstated so as to deter would-be souvenir collectors from pocketing pieces of the debris). While Bruce is only citing hearsay and the inaccuracy is therefore not strictly speaking his, he is citing it with the implication that it is true (indeed, the question at the end of the quoted paragraph assumes the rumor is fact).

And then there’s this assertion of fact which, in fact, isn’t factual at all:

Forgive us for not believing anything our government says. But you all have no credibility. One example is Kodiak island in Alaska. The U.S. government built a rocket launch facility there and promised the citizens of Alaska that it would only be used for civilian launches, never military. But in reality the only missions that have yet been launched have been Missile Defense Agency (MDA) tests.
[emphasis mine]

The Athena-1 launch of September 30, 2001 was not a BMDO/MDA launch, but rather a joint NASA – USAF Space Test Program launch known as “Kodiak Star”, with the Picosat, Sapphire, and PCSat technology demonstrators and Starshine 3 geodetic experiment as payloads. Oops.

Posted on April 16th, 2005 under Luddism. Comments: 8

Skimming this bit of the Convention on the Law of the Sea, I have to wonder whether a similar regime will be established should useful quantities of helium-3 be found on the Moon and the technology required to employ it in commercially viable fusion power generation be demonstrated.

For a resource that was trendy in the 1970s and appears to have fallen off the radar since, the LoS expresses an amount of interest in seafloor nodules that is obsessive to the point of sickness. Given the far greater economic potential of a fuel for clean fusion, one can imagine how much more greedy interested the “common heritage” crowd would be regarding He₃ exploration and extraction.

Posted on April 11th, 2005 under Space Commerce. Comments Off