Re: On Topic Tuesday: The Looming [...] Shortage


"James Nicoll" <jdnicoll@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:e3q8gg$8ds$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


I often mock people who adhere to clearly flawed models in
which basic materials run out, since generally the materials are
ones for which replacements exist or which are far more abundent
than people seem to think. I recently had my attention drawn to
a useful material of which there _is_ a looming shortage. Guess
what it is.



Not oil but plutonium. This is obvious in retrospect (and
to a particular subset of posters here, just obvious) but if you
don't make plutonium and you discourage other people from making it,
you may find yourself in a situation where outer planet probes are
problematic because there's only 15 kg of Pu-238 available to make
RTGs from and 10 of them are going to Mars.

http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00000564/

"we need RTGs, radioisotope thermoelectric generators. Right
now, the US has 15 kilos of plutonium-238 left for future RTGs, and 10
of those are earmarked for Mars Science Laboratory (MSL). We cannot do
another outer planets mission without more plutonium. Even if we started
this year, we couldn't start producing more until 2013 -- it would take
that long to get our systems back online to turn our limited remaining
supply of 300 kilos of neptunium-237 into plutonium-238 (at a production
rate of only 2.5 kilos per year)."

This is mainly a problem for the US, not because they are
massively incompetent but because when it comes to outer planet probes,
they enjoy what is close to a monopoly of effort. A shortage of Pu-238
for outer planet exploration cannot be a problem for nations that don't
do OPE.

So, SF about looming shortages of Stuff.

Actually, this was something of a booming subgenre in the 1970s.
Bova had the US and SU fighting over coal in Antarctica, to the point
where they were willing to risk WWIII, in MILLENNIUM. It's not immediately
clear to me why the Americans, who have an incredible amount of coal
in the CONUS, would do this, but in the book, they did. For that matter,
it's not like the SU didn't have the odd bit of oil (One of the things
that accelerated their inevitable demise was the oil glut that dropped
prices into the cellar).

In a more radio-isotope line of thought, in Jack Williamson's
SEETEE books, he had the nations of Earth and space run their power
metal reserves down, threatening them all with a massive shortage of
power. Oddly, although fusion _is_ mentioned in the context of explosions,
it doesn't seem to be useful for power and solar isn't even mentioned.
That may seem a little odd but I've read non-fiction about the long
term prospects for powering civilization from that period and judging
from them, the ideas of controlled fusion and non-thermal solar power
don't seem to have caught on until some time after 1950.

Come to think of it, wasn't there a Tim Powers SF novel driven
by the collapse of civilization after the fuels ran out?


Don't we have hundreds of kilos of plutonium stored from the dismantling of
old soviet warheads and some of our older ones? Maybe this stuff is not
good for making RTGs.

--
www.deanwhite.net


.

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