Strange that the article would say that when, in point of fact, the US is also working plans for lunar nuclear power. It's really the only sensible way to power a moon base with current technology, so anyone who is considering one is working designs for a nuclear power plant.
this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
114 points (96.0% liked)
News
21742 readers
3413 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
How do you cool a nuclear reactor on the moon?
The ground would probably work fine as a heat sink.
It's already pretty cold
The big problem with space is overheating. Space may be cold but there is no way to get rid of that heat except for radiators. Convection doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
Right, but conduction does work on the moon. You have the ground as a giant heatsink. While the surface does get pretty hot in daylight, I am guessing that heat doesn't go very deep so you could probably bury your cooling lines.
It just requires humans up there to dig and bury the cooling lines.
load more comments
(3 replies)
Only at night.
The lunar exosphere is too skimpy to trap or spread the Sun's energy, so differences between sunlit and shadowed areas on the Moon are extreme. Temperatures near the Moon's equator can spike to 250°F (121°C) in daylight, then plummet after nightfall to -208°F (-133°C).
https://science.nasa.gov/moon/weather-on-the-moon/
Which sounds like a pretty big challenge for a nuclear reactor. Maybe they only plan to put them on the poles?
Go Thorium MSR and bury it underground and you don't really have to worry about it. Might need some modification for moon gravity but otherwise seems like the best bet.
That was my first thought, but then my second thought was even more terrifying - how do you protect your nuclear power facility from celestial impacts? The moon must get pelted with thousands of little bits of space debris every day considering it has no atmosphere. All it would take is a basketball-sized meteorite to slam into the reactor chamber and possibly cause a meltdown.
Cover it with a ton of moon soil
We'll take a second moon, cut it in half, and use it as a shield for the first moon
That's a challenge that people are working on for sure. Likely some kind of radiant cooling, but it's a lot of heat.
Heat also dissipates via radiation, not just conduction. I would imagine that nuclear power on the moon won’t involve hauling a lot of liquid coolant/heat exchanger/energy transfer because liquids are wicked heavy, hauling that up to orbit and then landing it is gonna take a lot of energy. They do acknowledge that cooling is an issue they’re working on.
Maybe some kind of RTG? I couldn’t find an article that said what the NASA contractors chose to build.
No, RTGs just don't generate the kind of power you'd need. I mean, they're awesome for generating electricity for a long time, but just not a lot of it. No, these are fission plants.
Is solar power combined with battery storage not an option?
Not really. Current battery technology is to put it lightly not the type of thing you want to rely on for long term life support. Lithium ion the current go to for rechargeable batteries physically degrades as you charge it. One of the main things you can do to reduce this is don't fully charge the battery. For example if the battery degradation from 0%* to 100%** is a cycle then 50% to 80% is only 21% of a cycle. That'll extend the lifetime of the battery (not the capacity) by about 5 times! That's pretty significant but you lose out on 20% of the batteries capacity permanently, even as the capacity decreases from degradation.
You've probably seen the hype about Sodium batteries which are currently 50% less energy dense which just immediately means NOPE for use in space.
* Lithium ion batteries are extremely difficult to actually fully discharge (controller won't let you)
**Lithium ion batteries should never be fully charged it causes them excessive damage so the controller prevents this from happening
load more comments
(2 replies)
Much less power for the weight, and weight is the big deal when you're sending things from earth.
New Space Race while Americans just want healthcare.
I would settle for no fascism/the supremecist court to pull its head out of billionaires’ assholes
Look on the brightside: you can either have no healthcare and no space race or no healthcare and a space race.
Sure you are going to spend your last years dying of a preventable diabetes complication, but at least you get to see cool stuff going on. Instead of dying the same way anyhow and not seeing cool stuff.
If you other people could vote I would really appreciate it.
Why not both?
I'm all for this. This is the beginning of how all wars should be fought: On the moon. With giant robots.
How would you cool a nuclear power plant on the moon, no water?
Good question. Not all reactors by design need water as coolant. Some use molten salt, others are gas cooled.
These alternate cooling materials would likely still need to be imported though, so it doesn't particularly make it any easier.
My main question is the effect of the lower gravity on cooling the reactor (thermal hydraulic effects). All of our current reactors are designed for 1 g use, not 0.1654 g that's on the moon. Heat mixture rates in fluids would be different, which is important when you're calculating effective heat dissipation.
Just for fun, go check out xkcd's new What If video. They go into heat dissipation of a nuclear reactor in space (not the moon, but still incredibly interesting, informative, and entertaining).
You cool it with liquid thermal transfer and radiators. Here's what a kilopower plant looks like, the big disk is a radiator.
Maybe only turn it on at night when the surface gets cold and conduct it into the ground or land it in a permanent shadow? The article said they planned to do it fully automated so I am guessing digging of any form is out.
You don't just turn a nuclear power plant off.
I believe they mean inserting control rods to dampen the reactions to subcritical.
If sun is an issue, it might be simpler to set up a “beach umbrella”
With Blackjack! And Hookers!
Actually, forget the nuclear reactor and Blackjack!
Ehhh, screw the whole thing
Don't forget the blow!
A bit of a tangent, but I’m fascinated by the idea of a few “bases” permanently orbiting between Earth and Mars as a way to make that trip in comfort, to afford more shielding, larger quarters, more amenities. You just need to get it up to speed once, then future trips are just small shuttles to dock and drop off. I wonder if we’ll ever get to that point
Them: We're gonna put a nuke plant on the moon
Sane people: How are you going to get power back to Earth?
or: why?
Them: Did you know we're gonna put a nuke plant on the moon?
The idea is not to get the power back to earth, but to have power on the moon. Without power, you'll never have humans living there.
Lasers. It will be powering their orbital laser platform.
I really like that TV show: For All Mankind.
It's non-fiction 😉
lmao
view more: next ›