Search

Plutonium-238 is currently still the best fuel to power satellites to be sent to deep space in regions where the solar panels can no longer efficiently receive the sunlight. For 50 years, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has used this radioisotope as a fuel in radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) installed on satellites such as Pioneer 10 and 11, Voyager 1 and 2, Cassini-Huygens and New Horizons, as well as the various rovers sent to the Moon and to Mars, among others. Plutonium-238 is not a naturally occurring isotope on the planet, it was produced in greater quantity during the Cold War period as a by-product of the production of Plutonium-239 used for nuclear bombs. However, after the shutting down of the Savannah River reactors in 1988 and the ending of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States stock of Plutonium-238 has been increasingly reduced, which threatens NASA's future space projects. This paper presents a brief bibliographic review about the subject, as well as commentaries on the options available to the United States, from restarting the production of this fuel, to possible alternatives for a new type of fuel or equipment that may supply the spacecrafts.

One of the great advances in the current evolution of nuclear power reactors is occurring in India, with the Advanced Heavy Water Reactor (AHWR). It is a reactor that uses thorium as part of its fuel, which in its two fueling cycle options, in conjunction with plutonium or low enriched uranium, produces energy at the commercial level, generating less actinides of long half-life and inert thorium oxide, which leads to an optimization in the proportion of energy produced versus the production of burnt fuels of the order of up to 50%. The objective of this work is to present the most recent research and projects in progress in India, and how the expected results should be in compliance with the current sustainability models and programs, especially the "Green Chemistry", a program developed since the 1990s in the United States and England, which defines sustainable choices in its twelve principles and that can also be mostly related to the nuclear field. Nevertheless, in Brazil, for more than 40 years there has been the discontinuation of research for a thorium-fueled reactor, and so far there has been no prospect of future projects. The AHWR is an important example as an alternative way of producing energy in Brazil, as the country has the second largest reserve of thorium on the planet.

In the second half of the twentieth century in Brazil, several nuclear facilities were built for the most varied objectives. The largest number of such facilities is at the Nuclear and Energy Research Institute in São Paulo (IPEN-CNEN/SP). For different reasons, some of these facilities had their projects finalized and were deactivated. Some of the equipment was then dismantled, but the respective nuclear and radioactive material remained isolated in the original sites awaiting the proper decommissioning procedures. The Celeste Project is an example of a facility where the nuclear material has been kept, and is subject to Argentine-Brazilian Agency for Accounting and Control of Nuclear Materials (ABACC) periodic inspections. Because of a number of interests, including financial and/or budgeting situations at the institutions, decades have passed without any further action, and the people who withold information and knowledge about these facilities have already moved away from the area or are in the process of. Therefore, because of the absence of knowledge management techniques in force at the time of establishing and operating these installations, this work proposes an analysis about the possible consequences in case of loss of perhaps the only one remaining knowledge, the one from the people who designed those departments and worked there.