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NASA is testing a concept for powering future lunar and Mars bases that involve a nuclear power source the size of a trash can attached to an engine based on 19th Century technology called the Stirling Engine. The testing, using a non nuclear power source, is taking place at the Marshal Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. According to NASA, "For this particular test series, the Marshall reactor simulator was linked to a Stirling engine, developed by NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. The Stirling engine, named for 19th-century industrialist and inventor Robert Stirling, converts heat into electricity.

NASA is testing a concept for powering future lunar and Mars bases that involve a nuclear power source the size of a trash can attached to an engine based on 19th Century technology called the Stirling Engine. The testing, using a non nuclear power source, is taking place at the Marshal Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. According to NASA, "For this particular test series, the Marshall reactor simulator was linked to a Stirling engine, developed by NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. The Stirling engine, named for 19th-century industrialist and inventor Robert Stirling, converts heat into electricity.

Decommissioning nuclear weapons is a good thing. But when our boldest space missions depend on surplus nuclear isotopes derived from weapons built at the height of the Cold War, there is an obvious problem. If we're not manufacturing any more nuclear bombs, and we are slowly decommissioning the ones we do have, where will NASA's supply of plutonium-238 come from? Unfortunately, the answer isn't easy to arrive at; to start producing this isotope, we need to restart plutonium production. And buying plutonium-238 from Russia isn't an option, NASA has already been doing that and they're running out too…

NASA is running out of the special kind of plutonium needed to power deep space probes, worrying planetary scientists who say the U. S. urgently needs to restart production of plutonium-238. But it's unclear whether Congress will provide the $30 million that the administration requested earlier this year for the Department of Energy to get a new program going. Nuclear weapons use plutonium-239, but NASA depends on something quite different: plutonium-238. A marshmallow-sized pellet of plutonium-238, encased in metal, gives off a lot of heat.

NASA is stepping up its space radiation studies with a round of experiments that for the first time in decades will use monkeys as subjects. The point of the experiments is to understand how the harsh radioactive environment of space affects human bodies and behavior and what countermeasures can be developed to make long-duration spaceflight safe for travelers beyond Earth's protective magnetic shield. For the new study, 18 to 28 squirrel monkeys will be exposed to a low dose of the type of radiation that astronauts traveling to Mars can expect to encounter.

NASA is stepping up its space radiation studies with a round of experiments that for the first time in decades will use monkeys as subjects. The point of the experiments is to understand how the harsh radioactive environment of space affects human bodies and behavior and what countermeasures can be developed to make long-duration spaceflight safe for travelers beyond Earth's protective magnetic shield. For the new study, 18 to 28 squirrel monkeys will be exposed to a low dose of the type of radiation that astronauts traveling to Mars can expect to encounter.

For about two weeks there have been arguments over the "suddenly revived" Soviet-made nuclear-powered satellite which had been placed into an 800 km-high orbit in 1987. The military space vehicle suddenly started losing parts, sparking fears of a possible threat. Rest assured, the Kosmos 1818 satellite is incapable of destroying the Earth. However, the question forces consideration of space security issues in general. The back story is as follows. In mid-summer last year, NORAD tracking systems spotted the first signs of the satellite's disintegration. On July 4, NASA published the information recorded. The process gained momentum, in the current state of the satellite covered in the NASA orbital debris bulletin of January 15.

"Shortage of fuel squeezes exploration programme NASA's future solar system exploration programme could be threatened by a shortage of plutonium-238, New Scientist reports. Many of the agency's spacecraft rely on the nuclear fuel, but the US no longer produces the stuff, and despite previous estimates that the lack of plutonium-238 wouldn't bite until 2020, NASA is "already tightening its belt"."

It's an ambitious plan of NASA's to return astronauts to the Moon by 2020 and set up a lunar outpost. Just one of the many challenges their engineers face is finding a way to power this most remote manned beacon of human civilisation with nothing to burn, little sunlight, no running water and no wind. One solution, though, could be nuclear power. Fission Surface Power (FSP) is one of the more interesting options NASA is considering. If this method is chosen, an engine invented in the early 1800s by Scottish brothers Robert and James Stirling could help make it work.

"President Obama is supporting more nuclear power plants. But what about the nuclear waste? Shawn Allee reports on a new plan from the government. And... Dr. James Hansen - the author of 'Storms Of My Grandchildren.' Dr. Hansen was the first NASA scientist to tell Congress about climate change. Lester chats with him about global warming and politics."

Activists are protesting a decision by the California Department of Public Health that would allow the Boeing Co. and NASA to send contaminated dirt from a nuclear accident site to a waste facility in the San Joaquin Valley that is not licensed to accept radioactive waste. The Department of Toxic Substances Control, which has the final say, has sent a letter to the agency requesting more information on its decision that the dirt "does not represent a public health threat" and could be sent to the hazardous waste facility in Kettleman City. The dirt was dug up as part of a cleanup effort at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory near Los Angeles, where a partial meltdown of a nuclear reactor took place in 1959. The field lab was also used for rocket engine tests.

Activists are protesting a decision by the California Department of Public Health that would allow the Boeing Co. and NASA to send contaminated dirt from a nuclear accident site to a waste facility in the San Joaquin Valley that is not licensed to accept radioactive waste. The Department of Toxic Substances Control, which has the final say, has sent a letter to the agency requesting more information on its decision that the dirt "does not represent a public health threat" and could be sent to the hazardous waste facility in Kettleman City. The dirt was dug up as part of a cleanup effort at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory near Los Angeles, where a partial meltdown of a nuclear reactor took place in 1959. The field lab was also used for rocket engine tests.

Russia has reneged on an agreement to deliver a total of 10 kilograms of plutonium-238 to the United States in 2010 and 2011 and is insisting on a new deal for the costly material vital to NASA's deep space exploration plans. The move follows the U.S. Congress' denial of President Barack Obama's request for $30 million in 2010 to permit the Department of Energy to begin the painstaking process of restarting domestic production of plutonium-238. Bringing U.S. nuclear laboratories back on line to produce the isotope is expected to cost at least $150 million and take six years to seven years from the time funding is approved.

Russia has reneged on an agreement to deliver a total of 10 kilograms of plutonium-238 to the United States in 2010 and 2011 and is insisting on a new deal for the costly material vital to NASA's deep space exploration plans. The move follows the U.S. Congress' denial of President Barack Obama's request for $30 million in 2010 to permit the Department of Energy to begin the painstaking process of restarting domestic production of plutonium-238. Bringing U.S. nuclear laboratories back on line to produce the isotope is expected to cost at least $150 million and take six years to seven years from the time funding is approved.

"The largest toxic waste facility in the West rejected a proposal by Boeing Co. and NASA to accept tainted soil from the site of a partial nuclear meltdown. Chemical Waste Management, which operates the San Joaquin dump, sent a letter Tuesday to Linda Adams, head of the state Environmental Protection Agency, saying the facility would not accept the hazardous waste "because of the uncertainty and community concerns about levels of radioactive constituents in these materials." The dump just outside the tiny farming town of Kettleman City, halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, is not licensed to accept radioactive waste. The dirt was dug up as part of a cleanup effort at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory near Los Angeles where thousands of rockets were tested and a partial meltdown of a nuclear reactor took place in 1959."

One of the world's top climate scientists has written a personal new year appeal to Barack and Michelle Obama, warning of the "profound disconnect" between public policy on climate change and the magnitude of the problem. With less than three weeks to go until Obama's inauguration, Professor James Hansen, who heads Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, asked the recently appointed White House science adviser Professor John Holdren to pass the missive directly to the president-elect.

A draft cleanup agreement between the state and two federal agencies that conducted operations at a polluted former rocket engine and nuclear test site near Simi Valley was released Wednesday for public review and comment. Missing from the consent order between the state's Department of Toxic Substances Control, the U.S. Department of Energy and NASA is the Boeing Co., the primary owner of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory. "Unfortunately we have not gotten to a public review stage with Boeing," Maziar Movassaghi, acting director of the DTSC, said in an interview.

If a nuclear power plant in the US were to have issues, who would be affected? In a partnership between Nature News and Columbia University, we now have a Google map that tells us the population sizes around plants so we can easily scan and see the number of people that could be affected should anything occur at the plants. The team Power Reactor Information System (PRIS) database run by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and Columbia University's NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center to map out in an easy-to-read way, the location and size of nuclear power plants as well as population numbers around those plants. On the map, population sizes are illustrated with circle size as well as color. Green circles represent less than 500,000 people and on the other side of the scale, red circles represent populations of over 20 million.

"Campaigners in Japan are asking people to grow sunflowers, said to help decontaminate radioactive soil, in response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster that followed March's massive quake and tsunami. Volunteers are being asked to grow sunflowers this year, then send the seeds to the stricken area where they will be planted next year to help get rid of radioactive contaminants in the plant's fallout zone. The campaign, launched by young entrepreneurs and civil servants in Fukushima prefecture last month, aims to cover large areas in yellow blossoms as a symbol of hope and reconstruction and to lure back tourists. "We will give the seeds sent back by people for free to farmers, the public sector and other groups next year," said project leader Shinji Handa. The goal is a landscape so yellow that "it will surprise NASA", he said. The massive earthquake and tsunami left more than 23,000 people dead or missing on Japan's northeast coast and crippled the Fukushima nuclear power plant that has leaked radiation into the environment since. Almost 10,000 packets of sunflower seeds at 500 yen ($6) each have so far been sold to some 30,000 people, including to the city of Yokohama near Tokyo, which is growing sunflowers in 200 parks, Handa said."

Scientists using data from the recently-Moon-smacked Kaguya spacecraft have found evidence of radioactive elements on the lunar surface, including, for the first time, uranium! That's pretty cool. It's a little unexpected to me, too. One of the key aspects of the Moon is that it's not as dense as the Earth - in fact, it's just a bit more than half the Earth's density - so you don't expect it to have a lot of denser materials. Also, dense materials tend to sink and lighter ones float in a liquid, and we know the Moon was once entirely molten. So most of the uranium (which is among the densest of all elements) should be near the Moon's core, not on the surface. Most, but not all. It appears there is some on the surface!