New Small Fission Reactor For Deep-space Missions Demonstrated

It's probably less the number of probes we're sending, and more the general decrease in amount of Plutonium. PU hasn't been manufactured much since the end of the cold war; everybody is busy stepping down their weapon programs instead. Now, some of that former-warhead material is great for RTGs, but the stuff degrades. It has a moderately short half-life (it has to, or it wouldn't be active enough to passively generate the heat needed for an RTG) and a lot of the stuff that was viable for spacecraft 30 years ago is pretty cold now (see the Voyager probes, for example, which are running on extremely low power).

They can't just fix the problem by sending more, either; not only is it in short supply in general, but it's too heavy to send much on a spacecraft. Instead, they send enough to run the mission at full capacity for a few years, scaling back over time. That requires a supply of pretty fresh / pure Plutonium though, and that means making and separating more of it... except doing runs into a serious political problem. We *could* keep using RTGs (although they aren't perfect by any means, they get the job done) if we could convince people to let us manufacture their fuel source...

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/FmDcthzyYPk/story01.htm

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