NASA will be paying for the entire U.S. production of plutonium-238 spacecraft fuel, officials announced.
The new arrangement was unveiled in the White House's 2014 federal budget request. NASA had been sharing the production costs of plutonium-238 with the U.S. Department of Energy, which is a producer of the fuel. NASA, however, is the only agency slated to use the substance, and the White House has reacted accordingly.
"Since the [Obama] Administration has a 'user pays' philosophy, we are now in a position to pay for basically the entire enterprise, including the base infrastructure at DOE," NASA chief financial officer Beth Robinson said at a press conference on April 10. "We'll be partnering with DOE in the next couple of months to figure out how to best do this, and how to streamline the program to produce plutonium-238."
Plutonium-238 is a radioactive material that emits heat, which can be converted to electricity through a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG). RTGs have come in handy for NASA for deep space missions, where probes aren't able to generate enough power through sunlight. Examples include the Voyager spacecraft and the Mars Curiosity rover.
In 1988, the DOE halted production of Plutonium-238, at which point NASA began obtaining the fuel from Russia. Russia, however, halted shipments in 2010, leading many to question the future of RTG-based space exploration.
However, both the DOE and NASA are collaborating to restart production of the fuel, an effort that officials estimate will take five years and cost between $75 million and $90 million. The collaboration has made progress thus far, with NASA officials announcing in March that researchers at the DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee had successfully made plutonium-238 for the first time in 25 years.
"By optimizing the production process, it is estimated that 1.5 to 2 kilograms [3.3 to 4.4 pounds] per year will be produced by 2018," NASA officials wrote in their explanation of the agency's 2014 budget request. "This amount will be enough to meet NASA's projected needs for future planetary missions. The Science budget request fully funds this requirement."
"For the first time, NASA's request also includes $50 million to support the radioisotope power system development infrastructure through full-cost recovery mechanisms at the Department of Energy," NASA added.
