US Navy divers' suit heated by nuclear energy

The human body does not tolerate being under water very well. So it’s not surprising that from the very beginning of diving, one of the most important issues was to invent a suit that would provide adequate thermal comfort.

-- Advertisement --

There have been many ideas and some have taken off better and others worse. In order to find the best one, inventors have ventured into very different fields. In the 1960s, the US Navy even went as far as using nuclear power to ensure that the diver was properly heated!

The idea of using nuclear energy to heat a wet (!) diving suit came from the US Navy’s SEALAB programme. In the 1960s, the US Atomic Energy Commission tried to prove at any cost that the potential of nuclear energy could be used for more than just killing.

As a result of these efforts, scientists from the US Navy and the AEC have developed a diving suit heater based on the first isotope of plutonium-238, obtained by Glenn Seaborg in 1941. One gram of plutonium-238 generates 0.5 watts of power.

Interestingly, isotope 238 is a by-product of the production of… nuclear weapons. As it turned out, the aforementioned plutonium was ideal as a power source for heating diving suits… provided you can convince someone to dive in something like that.

It is true that plutonium-238 emits very strong radiation, but it is not the deadly radiation we think of and it is easy to isolate.

In any case, in this project the diver was additionally equipped with a canister, with a power pack in the form of 1kg of the isotope plutonium-238. From the canister come tubes filled with a special liquid, which is heated by the radiation in question.

Unfortunately, fledgling technology and diving knowledge were unable to adopt such a powerful step forward. A series of tests concluded that the entire system was unable to maintain thermal equilibrium and put the diver at serious risk of death from hypothermia.

A separate problem was the possibility of obtaining the isotope 238. Even in the days when the USA was engaged in producing nuclear weapons, it was difficult to obtain sufficient quantities of this type of plutonium. Today, although it is still in use, it is used to power the Voyager and Curiosity space probes, which travel through the cold and dark parts of the solar system.

To get an idea of how much it would cost today to heat a diving suit based on this plutonium, just quote NASA’s expenses. The 1.5kg produced annually for their needs is created in a process costing $50million!

Source: medium.com