Safe affordable fission engine
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Safe affordable fission engine (SAFE) were NASA's small experimental nuclear fission reactors for electricity production in space.[1] Most known was the SAFE-400 reactor concept intended to produce 400 kW thermal and 100 kW electrical using a Brayton cycle closed-cycle gas turbine.[2] The fuel was uranium nitride in a core of 381 pins clad with rhenium. Three fuel pins surround a molybdenum–sodium heatpipe that transports the heat to a heatpipe-gas heat exchanger. This was called a heatpipe power system.[3][4] The reactor was about Script error: No such module "convert". tall, Script error: No such module "convert". across and weighed about Script error: No such module "convert".. It was developed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Marshall Space Flight Center under the lead of Dave Poston.[5] A smaller test reactor called SAFE-30 was first built.[6]
The working fluid used in the reactor was a helium–xenon gas mixture.[7]
The project was funded with discretionary money in the lab's budget and done mostly outside the researchers' normal work.[8]
As of 2019, this project appears to have been superseded by Nasa's Kilopower.[9]
See also
- Kilopower
- Systems Nuclear Auxiliary Power Program and SNAP-10A, that flew in 1965
- SP-100
References
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