Uranium powered RTGs?

IOW there is no reason to have an isotope that has a half-life of 25,000 years when your probe will be out of communication range in 100 years and your thermocouple and the computer electronics on board died long before that.

In space weight is everything, if you have to add 100000 times more uranium to get the same localized heat as 1 volume of polonium-210 for shorter spaceflight. For longer spaceflight you want something that generates hot alpha particles (they are insulatable by paper thin shielding). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium#Power_and_heat_source. 238Pu has a power density of 570W/kg having a half-life of 87.4 years, whereas the shortest , and is a natural product of uranium decay. 232U is a synthetic product and difficult to obtain has a halflife of 69 years. THe closest natural isotope is 235U which has a half life of 700,000,000 years meaning you would need millions of times more Uranium, a specific type of heat retaining insulation to generate. MORE IMPORTANTLY, at this weight of 235U you surpass the critical mass (52Kg), this is a very bad thing for space-craft . . . .we not spacecraft specifically. . . but the poor unfortunate soul that constructed the RTG that blew up half the town.

Long story short

210Po- heat your feet in your soyuz moon going space craft. 238Pu - run your experiments in voyager (HL = 89 years) 235U - Make'm big'm bomb or or create Chernobyl frankenwolves.(critical mass is low but half-life is high)

238U - A slow degrading isotope of Uranium goes by the tradename DU (depleted uranium) good for blowing the crap out of any tanks that you don't happen to like.Uranium powered RTGs?

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