![]() EDF is substantially owned by the French Government, with around 85% shares in government hands. Électricité de France (EDF) – the country's main electricity generation and distribution company – manages the country's 56 power reactors. In May 2022, EDF reported that twelve reactors were shut down and being inspected for stress corrosion, requiring EDF to adjust its French nuclear output estimate for 2022 to 280-300 TWh the estimate of the impact of the decrease in output on the Group's EBITDA for 2022 was assessed to be -€18,5 billion. Since June 2020, it has 56 operable reactors totalling 61,370 MWe, one under construction (1630 MWe), and 14 shut down or in decommissioning (5,549 MWe). In 2018, the nuclear share was 71.67%, the highest percentage in the world. Since the mid 1980s, the largest source of electricity in France is Nuclear power, with a generation of 379.5 TWh in 2019 and a total electricity production of 537.7 TWh. You’ll have launch opportunities every year,” Thomas tells Mashable.Electricity production in France has been dominated by nuclear power since the early 1980s with a large portion of that power exported today. With a nuclear-powered rocket, “you don’t have to wait for the planets to align. These alignments allow the most energy-efficient trips to Mars, per NASA. For one, Mars and Earth only align on the same side of the sun every 26 months, writes the Washington Post’s Christian Davenport. ![]() The nuclear-powered rocket would have other benefits beyond decreasing the length of the trip. That means that before launch, “people are free to work around and near it safely.” And, since the nuclear reactor wouldn’t operate until well after the launch, “if there is some kind of first-stage launch vehicle failure that breaks the reactor and exposes the core, the materials in the core will be safe to those around the launch site,” she tells the publication.Īstronauts aboard a spacecraft with a nuclear-powered rocket would be separated from the engine by the hydrogen fuel tank, which would absorb some of the engine’s radiation, Dale Thomas, deputy director of the University of Alabama in Huntsville’s Propulsion Research Center, tells Mashable. “As long as the reactor is not turned on, it will not generate any … fission products,” Dodson says to Spectrum News. That helps ensure the material isn’t still radioactive when it re-enters Earth’s atmosphere, Pam Melroy, NASA’s deputy administrator, tells the publication. It would not be used to propel the rocket off the ground chemical rockets would be used for the launch, and the nuclear-powered engines would kick in once the spacecraft had traveled between 400 and 1,300 miles into space, according to Mashable. Officials said that the rocket would be safe for both people on Earth and astronauts in space. Nuclear thermal rockets can be three times as efficient as chemical propulsion, per NASA’s statement. A fission reactor in the rocket would generate heat to expand a liquid propellant, which would shoot out of a nozzle to propel the spacecraft. The new rocket would harness the power of nuclear fission, in which a rapidly moving neutron crashes into an atom, splitting it into two smaller atoms and releasing large amounts of energy. The new project-dubbed DRACO, short for Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations-“will build on those lessons learned” from earlier experiments, says Tabitha Dodson, DARPA’s program manager for DRACO, to Spectrum News’ Anthony Leone. ![]() military and NASA first conducted experiments on nuclear rockets in the 1950s, but they never launched to space, writes Bob McDonald of CBC Radio. NASA and DARPA aim to test the engine in space as soon as 2027. “With the help of this new technology, astronauts could journey to and from deep space faster than ever-a major capability to prepare for crewed missions to Mars,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson says in a statement. Nuclear thermal propulsion could cut the length of a trip to Mars from nine months to two, reports Mashable’s Elisha Sauers. Long journeys in space can expose astronauts to harmful levels of radiation, and lots of time in microgravity can cause loss of bone density, loss of muscle mass and vision problems. But one major challenge is the amount of time it takes to get there. ![]() The space agency aims to send its first crewed mission to Mars in the 2030s. Astronauts might one day travel to Mars with a rocket fueled by nuclear power: NASA and the Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) are teaming up to develop a nuclear thermal rocket engine, which would dramatically improve a trip to the Red Planet, NASA said in late January. ![]()
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