NASA wants plutonium to fuel spacecraft from a U.S.-based private company instead of from unreliable Russian suppliers.
NASA wants to buy new Plutonium-238 (Pu-238) from Technical Solutions Management (TSM). Currently, NASA buys Pu-238 from Russia at about $45,000 per ounce — 10 pounds is needed to fuel a spacecraft.
Russia reneged on a deal to sell 22 pounds to the U.S. in 2009, prompting NASA to begin looking for other ways to get spacecraft fuel.
At first, NASA waited for the Department of Energy (DOE) to resume production of Pu-238, but little came of this effort. DOE teams took three years to make about 0.44 pounds of Pu-238, less than five percent of the requirements for a single space probe. Now, NASA is turning to a private supplier.
The company TSM “could establish a redundancy in the production of plutonium; it could potentially increase capacity, if the [NASA] missions needed increased capacity, and as a result, it could minimize the programmatic risk overall to the space program,” Billy Shipp, the CEO of TSM and former director of the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory, told Space.com.
Pu-238 is a radioactive byproduct of producing nuclear weapons, and is an irreplaceable source of power for deep-space missions. After the Cold War, America stopped making new Pu-238 and only has enough left to fulfill NASA’s mission schedule until 2026. TSM plans to start generating usable amounts of Pu-238 by 2022.
Pu-238 is an incredibly stable power source that can act like a battery for spacecraft, as it has a radioactive half-life of almost 90 years. Most NASA deep-space probes, including Voyager and the latest Curiosity Mars Rover, have used Pu-238 and future planned missions would require more of the stuff. There is currently only 77 pounds of Pu-238 left in America, and only half of that is in usable condition. That’s only enough for three or four missions — based on the Curiosity rover’s use of roughly 10 pounds of the power source.
There isn’t a good substitute for Pu-238 either. Solar simply cannot provided enough energy to power a spacecraft as it gets further away from the sun. Chemical batteries don’t last long enough to be useful, while nuclear fission power systems are too heavy and alternative radioactive isotopes have other issues.
Restarting Pu-238 production is likely to be incredibly difficult and expensive. The general cost estimates are around $125 million over the next ten years.
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