1 / 8
Rocket Sled
To explore the solar system’s darkest, deepest, and most frigid territories, nuclear batteries are the best power sources available. There is, however, a downside: The isotope of plutonium inside them (plutonium-238) is some 270 times more radioactive than the isotope of plutonium inside nuclear bombs (plutonium-239).
As a result, anti-nuclear activists consistently protest the launches of NASA’s plutonium-powered probes. They posit that space exploration isn’t worth the risk of catastrophe. But the Department of Energy, which builds the batteries inside NASA’s fleet of deep-space robots, spared no abuses in assessing their safety.
More on Plutonium-238:
NASA's Plutonium Problem Could End Deep-Space Exploration
The Best Plutonium-Powered Space Missions
Timeline: Plutonium-238's Hot and Twisted History“They wanted proof of the worst that could happen, so we did our best to smash them, blown them up, shoot them and break them,” said Mary Ann Reimus, an impact test engineer at Los Alamos National Laboratory who tested the safety of nuclear batteries throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Reimus and others carried out most of their tests in remote deserts near Albuquerque, New Mexico while looking on from concrete bunkers. To conserve precious plutonium, researchers simulated the metal using similarly dense depleted uranium, which posed far less of a radiological threat. Photographs documenting the DOE’s battery testing program are lost in an expansive Indiana Jones-style warehouse without an archivist to locate them, according to a DOE spokesperson. Fortunately, Reimus kept copies of her studies and shared them with WIRED. In the photo above, a rocket sled at Sandia National Laboratories accelerates a missile to hundreds of miles per hour. Similar rocket sleds smashed, sliced and slammed log-sized nuclear batteries to explore the limits of their safety. Neither the depleted uranium nor limited amounts of plutonium-238 had any chance of causing a runaway nuclear explosion during the tests. See how the government pushed the limits of its radioactive power sources in the rest of this gallery.
NASA's Plutonium Problem Could End Deep-Space Exploration
The Best Plutonium-Powered Space Missions
Timeline: Plutonium-238's Hot and Twisted History“They wanted proof of the worst that could happen, so we did our best to smash them, blown them up, shoot them and break them,” said Mary Ann Reimus, an impact test engineer at Los Alamos National Laboratory who tested the safety of nuclear batteries throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Reimus and others carried out most of their tests in remote deserts near Albuquerque, New Mexico while looking on from concrete bunkers. To conserve precious plutonium, researchers simulated the metal using similarly dense depleted uranium, which posed far less of a radiological threat. Photographs documenting the DOE’s battery testing program are lost in an expansive Indiana Jones-style warehouse without an archivist to locate them, according to a DOE spokesperson. Fortunately, Reimus kept copies of her studies and shared them with WIRED. In the photo above, a rocket sled at Sandia National Laboratories accelerates a missile to hundreds of miles per hour. Similar rocket sleds smashed, sliced and slammed log-sized nuclear batteries to explore the limits of their safety. Neither the depleted uranium nor limited amounts of plutonium-238 had any chance of causing a runaway nuclear explosion during the tests. See how the government pushed the limits of its radioactive power sources in the rest of this gallery.
All images: Department of Energy (Note: Some image processing was used to recover the quality of scanned printed photographs.)
