Safe Affordable Fission Engine

High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Safe Affordable Fission Engine (SAFE) are NASA's small experimental nuclear fission reactors for electricity production in space. Most known is the SAFE-400 reactor producing 400 kW thermal power, giving 100 kW of electric energy using a Brayton cycle gas turbine. The fuel is uranium nitride in a core of 381 pins clad with rhenium. Three fuel pins surround a molybdenum-sodium heatpipe that transports the heat to a heatpipe-gas heat exchanger. This is called a Heatpipe Power System. The reactor is about 50 centimetres (20 in) tall, 30 centimetres (12 in) across and weighs about 1,200 kilograms (2,600 lb).... Mehr