Plutonium-238 Scarcity Could Derail Future NASA Space Missions

NASA's future space missions may be delayed or cancelled to the scarcity of plutonium-238 which has been used by the space agency to fuel its manned spacecrafts for the past 50 years.

Scientists say that without additional stores of this fuel, the agency's ability to conduct future planetary science is in jeopardy, adding that it is something the United States simply cannot afford.

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity which is scheduled to launch Nov. 26, is powered by this radioactive element.

However, with the chemical getting scarce, Curiosity may be the last in a long line of spacecrafts to be powered by plutonium.

"It's like having a car and no gasoline in the car," said Ralph McNutt, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory and a project scientist for NASA's Messenger mission to Mercury.

"The development of this power system has taken place in the U.S. over five decades, and we're on the verge of throwing it all away."

In 2009, the National Research Council reported that plutonium-238 has been and will continue to be "essential to the U.S. space science and exploration program."

The council recommended that domestic production of the material be restarted in order to sustain NASA's planetary science program, and to avoid delays or even cancellations of future missions.

Plutonium-238 is a toxic substance that gives off heat that can be converted to electricity in the cold, dark depths of space.

The United States produced this highly toxic chemical in facilities that supported the nuclear weapons program during the Cold War but they stopped making it in the late 1980s.

The NASA has used these plutonium-powered systems for famous missions like the Voyager probes.

However, Jim Adams, deputy director of planetary science at NASA, told NPR that even with slow down in space exploration due to budget constraints, fuel for NASA missions is only up to around 2022.

Heroin Poppy crops growing in England

British troops are fighting a ferocious and often lethal war in Afghanistan, to eradicate the country's opium poppy crop while large swathes of the English countryside are being turned over to the very same crop - with the full backing of the Government.

Farmers are cultivating the poppies to combat a critical shortage of morphine in NHS hospitals, and are finding it a lucrative crop.

In the UK, the Home Office has granted pharmaceutical company Macfarlan Smith a licence to harvest the poppies, and now they are being grown in dozens of farms across Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire.

The move aims to ease the severe lack of diamorphine that has hit the NHS, and the rest of the world, for several years.

Guy Hildred has dedicated more than 100 acres of his farm near Ipsden, Oxfordshire, to poppies. He said: "It is worthwhile from a farmer's point of view and it's an expanding market."

Cultivation of the crop for legal means has expanded rapidly in Britain since trials began six years ago - but the global morphine shortage is so severe that Foreign Office Minister Lord Malloch-Brown has raised the possibility of legalising opium growing in Afghanistan.

A Home Office spokeswoman said: "The poppies in question, Papaver somniferum, can be grown without a licence. The extraction of the drugs is a complex industrial process and the people who work to produce the drugs have to be licensed.

"In addition, the Home Office receives information about where the poppy farmers are and how much they are growing from the pharmaceutical companies. We then send growers a letter that they are encouraged to show to local police to make them aware of their activities."