What's powering Voyager is a plutonium pile. Pretty sure you don't want that in your fridge. 10 billion miles from me? Sure, knock yourself out. 10 feet from me? No way.
Plutonium was generated in reactors in the US but those were all shut down by the late 80s. It's not an easy thing to just mine or make more of there were whole reactors basically dedicated to just what we have left today. In fact we're kind of running out of the stuff for scientific missions, NASA only has enough for one RTG left according to reports.
To some extent, but plutonium is relatively rare. Because it's radioactive an it decays, there isn't that much in nature. You can make some as a byproduct of uranium fission reactors, but again, I believe collecting and refining it takes a lot of energy... You could always cover your roof in solar panels. They could potentially last 40 years, and the cost is anywhere between 10K to 20K installed. It's relatively affordable amortized over a 30-year mortgage, and considering it produces usable power.
I was thinking it would be fun to buy some uranium 238 (you can have up to ~7kg of it without a license). Then I tried ddg'ing what it would cost to dispose of. I couldn't find an answer, so I decided buying uranium wasn't a good idea.
It's hard enough getting rid of an old lead-cell battery.
I do wonder what it takes to end up on a watch list and assumed attempting to get plutonium or even discussing an attempt would be a guarantee.
I went searching and this website on watch lists appears to be real, whilst also seeming like a joke.
“Since there are many reasons why a traveler may seek redress, DHS TRIP works with the TSC, as appropriate, when an inquiry appears to be related to the watchlist.
The TSC does not accept redress inquiries directly from the public. Instead, members of the public should contact the relevant screening agency with their questions or concerns about screening.”
I can't imagine people would like seeing enriched uranium. Sure it'd make a good story, but people don't even want to see my ore sample. Deleted uranium should also be fun; I'd love to have some dice made of it: https://www.orau.org/PTP/collection/consumer%20products/dudi...
Plutonium is fairly rare, so I'm not sure it could be scaled up easily, even if there was a demand for it. Not to mention we probably don't want the raw material for nuclear bombs to be inside easily accessible home appliances...
Not really, it's all artificially produced and would require generation of lots of power (it comes from reactors) to produce it at scale. The only times we used to do it at any reasonable scale was for nuclear weapons. It's also restricted by treaty because of this.
> easily shielded by essentially any solid material
If that shield fails for any reason, including tampering, you're looking at the radiological contamination and likely deaths of everyone nearby at the very least.
Alpha sources outside the human body are of little health concern. You'd have to break it open and eat the plutonium inside for it to be a serious risk.
How familiar are you with the human species? There have been several notable accidents where humans have cracked open medical machines and decay powered lighthouses to exactly this effect. Imagine if you started whacking plutonium in consumer products!
A caesium-137 radioactivity source was left behind and eventually stolen. The thieves successfully dismantled it despite sustaining severe injuries in the process, exposing the radioactive material contained in the shielded capsule. They were fascinated by the strange light emitted by it.
Eventually it was sold to a scrapyard. The owner also became fascinated with the blue glow. He brought the thing home to show everyone. He distributed parts of the material to friends and family. Eventually sold it to another scrapyard but not before his brother took some of the beautiful radioactive dust and smeared it on the concrete floor. Where his daughter sat and ate a contaminated sandwich. She also applied he powder on her own body.
The only reason this unfortunate chain of events stopped is the scrapyard owner's wife noticed everyone was getting sick and notified the authorities. She died later along with the girl. Attempts to bury the child also led to a riot. Scrapyard workers also died attempting to extract the lead from the radiation shielding component.
> the scrapyard owner's wife noticed everyone was getting sick and notified the authorities[...]
The Wikipedia article and the Portuguese source it links to seems ambiguous on the matter of whether it was because she notified the authorities, or because a visiting scientist thought to use radiation detectors on other people reporting to the hospital a day after her notification.
> How familiar are you with the human species? There have been several notable accidents where humans have cracked open medical machines and decay powered lighthouses to exactly this effect. Imagine if you started whacking plutonium in consumer products!
People already dope silicone bands and fabric (including underwear!) with Thorium and sell them as "negative ion" "wellness" products. Some are still available to buy on Amazon.
Because there's nothing like "wellness" than exposing your gonads to ionising radiation!
aside from the fact that 'breaking open a refrigerator' doesn't remotely sound like something a child would ever do to me, let's assume the worst and the child somehow opens up a refrigerator.
a conventional fridge has electric motors/pumps , live a/c wiring, and gas under pressure. It's not radiation-spilling-everywhere unsafe, but it's not really safe for the kid, either.
That refrigerator is discarded. It ends up in a scrapyard. Someone comes, sees the shielded capsule containing radioactive material and harvests the lead. The remains are eventually sold to someone else and it ends up in that person's home where children are likely to become fascinated by it or even eat it.
Everyone who went near this thing is likely to become ill at the very least.
let's not forget that nation-state(s) (maybe singular, but not certain) have weaponized Polonium[1], and also the ubiquity of americium-241[2] which could be used similarly...Outside the human body but readily available for inimical ends...
It's not actually a reactor. The plutonium is just emitting radiation, as plutonium will do, and you harness some of the natural heat energy with thermocouples. There's no explosion risk, although you would certainly need trustworthy shielding.
But it’s also hideously expensive. Plutonium is, apparently, one of the safer ways to build these things, because it is easy to shield, and the power density is good. But plutonium, as it’s not naturally occurring, is stratospherically expensive.
Additionally, the decay product of Pu-238 is U-234. Though a relatively 'safe' alpha emitter, it's half-life is ~200,000 years.
Note: With alpha emitters, it's 'safe' if it's outside your body, your skin can absorb it. But once you eat or inhale it, you get the full blast right into the quickest dividing cells in your body.
The first nuclear bombs cost billions of dollars each.
I wish I could say that’s a good thing. But no, after the first of them, nuclear weapons seem to have justified their own existence, no matter the cost.
I would rather see remaining weapons material repurposed as deep-space power sources. If that were to solve problems.
There's a lot of waste heat put out by RTG. The one powering Perseverance has an output of about 110W but thermocouples have about 5% efficiency so there's ~1900W of heat you have to deal with. For a fridge the running power can be almost double that it's just completely silly on Earth except for odd places like the lighthouses along Russia's northern coast where there was no way to get a grid connection, not enough sun for solar, and suppling diesel constantly was impractical.
There's a TON of power generation alternatives that look much better both from the "trying to not give you a lot of cancer" standpoint and the "efficiency is something we care about" standpoint. Most RTGs make about 3 to 6% efficiency, while a random Amazon 100w solar panel will give you 15/22% without most of the risks.
The main reason this are used vs (or sometimes along!) other technologies is that they function rather happily in super crappy conditions we don't -unless some world-ending event happens soonish- usually have on Earth.
