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Post Info TOPIC: rorsat reactors
peter gotthardsen

Date:
rorsat reactors


I have for some time been looking at soviets old space program.

one thing that peopol never talk about are the 940kg highly enriched urarium in orbit.

can these reactor be salvaged?
can they be reinserted in a new reactor?

Peter Gotthardsen.


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10kBq jaro

Date:

As for the highly enriched uranium fuel, it would certainly *not* be worthwhile mounting a salvage mission to get it -- we have many thousands of kilos of HEU that is being taken out of weapons stocks and diluted to LEU (low-enriched uranium) for power plant fuel, as part of the "Megatons to megawatts" program.


As for the reactor units themselves, with energy-converting thermionic cells (or whatever the Soviets used on the Rorsats), I suspect they had a limited life, which would long since have passed. Various kinds of materials degradation mechanisms will likely have made them useless by now.


However, I imagine that a couple hundred years from now, they may become sufficiently easy to salvage, that they may simply be collected as historical artefacts for some museum display.....



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