You know, it’s kind of sad that no one is willing to invest in nuclear energy anymore. Wait, what? NuScale Power celebrated the news of its company-saving $30 million investment from Fluor Corp. Thursday morning with a press conference in Washington, D.C. Fluor is a design, engineering and construction company involved with some 20 plants in the 70s and 80s, but it has not held interest in a nuclear energy company until now. Fluor, which has deep roots in the nuclear industry, is betting big on small-scale nuclear energy with its NuScale investment. "It's become a serious contender in the last decade or so," John Hopkins, [Fluor’s group president in charge of new ventures], said. And that brings us to NuScale, which had run into some dark days – maybe not as dark as, say, Solyndra, but dire enough : Earlier this year, the Securities Exchange Commission filed an action against NuScale's lead investor, The Michael Kenwood Group. The firm "misap
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A vision of nuclear propulsion to send humans to the planets is taking shape on the high desert of the Snake River plain in eastern Idaho even though there is no spaceport here. A design from the 1960s to send space payloads to the Moon, Mars, and beyond using a nuclear reactor is being updated with new ideas and technologies. Stephen Howe, Director of the Center for Space Nuclear Research (CNSR), in Idaho Falls, ID, says his design ideas could, if implemented, carry an additional eight tons of payload on a mission to send astronauts to the Moon.
If you are thinking in terms of moving coal or grain along the Mississippi in a river barge, eight tons is a sneeze in the scheme of things. However, in the rocket ship business, where payloads are measured by the pound, and with costs at lift off measured in the tens of thousands of dollars per pound of payload, eight tons is a very big number.
http://djysrv.blogspot.com/2007/07/new-life-for-nukes-in-space.html
Furthermore, chemical rockets are simply inadequate for space travel. Either you need to use energy from somewhere else (which means some form of solar), or a more energy dense fuel, which means nuclear. And solar energy is simply too diffuse in the outer solar system.
If we want to do substantive exploration of our solar system, we'll have to continue to use nuclear energy. It's that simple.
http://www.nuclearspace.com/