[ RadSafe ] Reply to Franz

[John Ahlquist]

Franz,

The 4000 MW[t] is not an error.  For much more information, type "Phoebus 2A" 
into Google.  I was involved in the tests of these reactors. I believe the 
authors have an error in the run time of this reactor.  On the final full power 
run, It ran at 4000 MW for  12-15 minutes, reduced the power and came back up to 
full power and then repeated the cycle one more time.  This was to test the 
effects of temperature cycling on the fuel.  The reactor was designed to run at 
5000 MW but some internal core temperatures prohibited the operators from going 
that high.

The reactor was intended for deep space exploration.  It would be lifted into 
space by a chemically-fueled rocket.  In space there would not need to be much 
shielding to protect the crew and the liquid hydrogen coolant/propellant tanks 
would be between the crew and the reactor.  The stated goal was to operate for 
10 hours and be able to stop and start it up to 60 times.  It would generate 
250,000 lbs of thrust.

LLNL was developing a nuclear ramjet engine for aircraft. It could not be 
practically used because of high radiation dose rates.

John

Message: 2
Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2011 20:00:20 +0100
From: Franz Sch?nhofer <franz.schoenhofer at chello.at>
Subject: Re: [ RadSafe ] UHTREX
To: "'The International Radiation Protection \(Health Physics\)
    MailingList'"    <radsafe at health.phys.iit.edu>, <mcnaught at lanl.gov>,
    <john.ahlquist at sbcglobal.net>
Message-ID: <15DD93FE9DFF460E8B08252637DEE804 at pc1>
Content-Type: text/plain;    charset="iso-8859-1"

Dear collegues,

I try to send this information to you at your personal addresses, since
RADSAFE has not only changed its name "International...." (how many non-US
citizens are still on RADSAFE???), but also the feature "reply to all" does
not reach the original sender. Furthermore my posts are so carefully
censored - sorry, "monitored", that even announcements for scientific
conferences are not forwarded to the list since weeks, not to talk about
other completely harmless scientific comments and answers to inquiries from
RADSAFErs. 

My answer to the topics raised:

Michael, look at Google, using simply "UHTREX" as the search criterium. I am
not at all an expert in this question, but in Wikipedia obviously an expert
covered the topic. I personally believe that it is very plausible. Otherwise
there is obviously not much to be found on Google. 

John, as mentioned above I am not an expert and I did not search for the
project Rover on Google. I know very well from the times when I was young,
that nuclear energy was considered then as a universally applicable remedy
for all technological questions. It did not take a very long time until
disillusion occurred - long before anti-nuclear groups started their
campaigns. I personally am not afraid of radioactivity but I do not like the
thought that nuclear reactors with highly enriched uranium are flying above
me..... You mentioned, that Phoebus ran at 4 000 MW(t) - there must be an
error of several orders of magnitude. Furthermore I am skeptic about the
supply of liquid hydrogen in deep space.