The Government has offered Australia's three mobile operators, and vividwireless, renewal of their existing spectrum allocated on 15 year licences in the late 90s and early 2000s at set prices, while the Government expects to rake in $3 billion.
As an interesting sideline, the U.S. space agency NASA drew up a report in September 1988, over twenty years ago, entitled “Megawatt Class Nuclear Space Power Systems (MCNSPS) conceptual design and evaluation report. Volume 2, technologies 1: Reactors, heat transport, integration issues.”
The 1988 article includes the statement, “Free Piston Stirling gas engines coupled to linear actuated alternators have an advantage for space application because they can be made to have a high efficiency, and designed to operate between any temperatures for which suitable construction materials can be found."
"However, very high power engines operating at the high temperatures required for megawatt class electric power systems have never been approached in Stirling engine technology.”
A Stirling engine is a heat engine that operates by compressing and expanding air, or another gas, repeatedly in order to produce heat. The heat is then used to power a vehicle, such as a spacecraft.
Heat sources that have been studied in the past include solar, geothermal, waste, biological, and, most importantly in this case, nuclear.
The U.S. space program already use small Stirling engines in some of its spacecraft that explore the outer solar sytem or have extended missions where sunlight is not available in sufficient quantities.
Called the Stirling Radioisotope Generator (SRG), they generate electricity from a dry, solid nuclear fuel for missions in deep space.
Generating hundreds of watts of power, these small SRGs will need to be upgraded and/or modified so they can generate millions of watts of power for spacecraft that use Megawatt-class nuclear space power systems (MCNSPS).
The ability to use MCNSPS spacecraft was not possible in 1988. Of course, that was over twenty years ago....
David Bass
| ComOps, a leading Australian provider of business software products and services, has won a competitive tender to deploy its Salvus safety, r…
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