The headline is potentially misleading. There are already "nuclear power plants" based on radioisotope decay of Pu238 on Mars (and old ones on the Moon) as well as beyond, such as Voyager 1, 2, and New Horizons (all of which are still operating). They're called RTGs.
In order to get approval to launch nuclear material, the launch vehicle must be nuclear-rated (like human-rating, it ensures safety). With the recent retirement of the Delta II, only the Atlas V is currently nuclear-rated, but eventually others may be. Additionally, the fuel is encased in boxes designed to withstand launch failure and impact into the ocean without releasing the contents.
In the case of RTGs, the fuel is always releasing heat and is always radioactive. For fission reactors, the fuel is relatively inert and non-radioactive until it is turned on.
Actually the RTG fuel capsule thermal and mechanical protection is so good, that when the Nimbus B satellite fell into the ocean due to a launch failure, they recovered it's RTG power source from the ocean floor and relaunched it on Nimbus 3:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimbus_B
If I recall correctly, the RTG that was on Apollo 13's Lunar Module also survived reentry (since they dumped it into Earth's atmosphere after using it as a life boat). It's intact somewhere on the bottom of the ocean.
CIA and IB (Indian Intelligence) lost such Plutonium RTG powered listening device at a Himalayan peak in 1965 used for SIGINT against China. Further expeditions to retrieve the device resulted in failure and later they installed another such device in 1967[1] which was supposedly taken out in 1968.
I think they are going for something more than a simple RTG. I read a few years ago about Stirling engines in zero/low gravity. I think that is what they are going for, something with moving parts, rather than a relatively inefficient static RTG.
I'm less familiar with Kilopower but I spent a couple years working on something very similar that ran off of PU-238. Looks like Kilopower is U-235.
Looking into this, it needs a simple control system. The PU-238 bricks just made heat continuously with no control. But, they were also much less power.
If there's a control system you can launch the reactor cold. With the Plutonium bricks you cannot, meaning your cooling system (engine in this case) has to keep running during launch.
An rtg can be designed to handle cooling failure. It isn't like a water reactor. As the brick heats it expands, decreasing reactivity and heat production. So an rtg can live perfectly well without its cooling system. It won't be making useful power, but it isn't going into meltdown either.
The RTG has to be kept cool continuously on the launch pad with a nitrogen purge. All cooped up in a fairing, it’d cook the spacecraft if the heat wasn’t rejected somehow
Half a century ago some companies actually planned for things like that - a small nuclear reactor that you would bury under your house and it would provide you with power for decades. It went the same way the nuclear car did - the concept would work but it's just too dangerous without constant supervision.
I had never heard of that, but the idea of it makes me think of all my neighbors growing up in the 90s who were spending tens of thousands of dollars cleaning up contamination from leaking underground heating oil tanks. It was a major issue for people buying and selling older houses...sellers hiding knowledge of leaking tanks, surprise discoveries etc. In the worst cases the soil decontamination could cost over $100k. I can only imagine what fun these end-of-life home nuclear reactors would be causing 50 years later!
I visited a home once that was built in the mid 20th century on the assumption that electricity would become too cheap to meter. The original heating system was described to me as just a bunch of resistive elements strung in the attic. I think the house actually got an award similar to LEED (or maybe it was LEED?) at its construction.
My parent's late 70s house has something like this. There are heating elements sandwiched between two layers of drywall in the ceiling. It actually works really well, because it heats objects rather than the air--sort of like the sun on a cool, cloudless day--but electricity is like 4x the cost of natural gas so it never gets used. Also, the attic has insufficient insulation, so half the heat would go the wrong way.
Oh yeah my (boarding) high school had a dorm built in the “electricity will soon be too cheap to meter” era and had heating elements set into the concrete floors. It housed like 50 students and used more electricity than all of the other buildings on the 500 student campus combined. The warm floors were very nice though!
Fair enough. Still, it's one thing to be specced for 24kW peak load (the breaker) and quite another to require 20kW continuous (two 10kW nuclear power plants). I still think 20kW is an awfully huge amount of power - the average US house only uses about 1 kilowatt when you smooth it out.
Same as in a car or any air conditioner. You pump a hot fluid to/from radiators. Look at the iss. See the big black structures always held perpendicular to the solar panels. Those are the radiators.
You build your walls out of Peltier elements. On one side of capsule, hot side will be in, cold side out, the other side of the capsule, the reverse. And then you use the generated power to drive a laser to shoot the energy right back into the sun.
This is exactly the issue I see with nuclear. We're creating dangerous waste products that last tens of thousands of years (normal nuclear - I know RTGs don't stay radioactive nearly as long!), and are easily weaponised.
Yet on the other hand we can't even keep a country stable for more than a few decades. The soviet union fell into disarray that time leading to all kinds of incidents, and we had a major world war only 75 years ago which is nothing on nuclear waste time scales.
One way or another this will bite humanity in the back in the future. If it isn't by a malicious future actor weaponising it, it'll be by neglected nuclear waste storage facilities that last much shorter than the waste itself.
For another example of things that can happen see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident . That one was medical in origin but the same can happen to nuclear waste when not adequately protected of which there is a lot more.
>The headline is potentially misleading. There are already "nuclear power plants"
It is not potentially misleading. This is just you being pedantic about a connection that very few people make. When you say "nuclear power plant", people tend to think of nuclear fission reactors, not RTGs or fusion reactors. Both of these are applicable to the term "nuclear power plant", but only one is commonly referred to by the term. A lot more people would feel misled if it actually referred to RTGs when it said "nuclear power plant."
The only group that it could potentially mislead is people who know RTGs exist. Most of those people would instead think "I wonder what kind of nuclear power plant it is" instead of "wow, what a misleading headline!" unless they were intending to be pedantic (like you).
The plutonium in an RTG is the wrong type from a weapons perspective.
The casing on RTGs have typically been designed to survive reentry. One example is Nimbus B - the rocket failed late in flight. The RTG was recovered from the ocean, refurbished, and flown again on Nimbus 3.
> The reactor must be able to generate an uninterrupted electricity output of at least 10 kilowatts. The average U.S. residential home, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, uses about 11,000 kilowatt-hours per year.
Would be more helpful to express that as 11000/365/24 = 1.256 kilowatt, so you understand that the reactor could only power 8 U.S. homes.
Holiday homes, homes held as a capital investment and not leased out, homes of people who have entered long-term care but not sold the primary residence...
It's kind of like radians vs. degrees. Degrees seem ridiculous if you're doing trig, but working with irrational fractions of pi is ridiculous if you're trying to measure with a protractor. If you need to convert to radians to do some trig (and let's be honest you usually don't) you are going to end up converting something like degrees that are marked on the protractor anyway.
Degrees are ridiculous if you're doing calculus. They don't really pose any problems if you're doing trig.
> but working with irrational fractions of pi is ridiculous if you're trying to measure with a protractor.
Sure, that's true, but that's only because irrational numbers are by definition infinitely precise. It's no more difficult to use a protractor labeled in increments of 0.02 radians than one labeled in increments of one degree.
Realistically, it probably would; those marks would just not fit into the progression of .02 radian marks. Ever seen a meter stick that also measured inches?
Are you trying to measure an angle, draw a particular angle, or confirm that an angle meets a particular standard?
That's a general statement I'd agree with, but it's a losing battle. So many consumer products are rated by power that "I turn this 2000 W thing on for 1 hour, thus it consumes 2000 Wh of energy" is kind of convenient, if weird.
My real surprise and problem comes with Wh/x, where x is any unit of time. Why not cancel h/x for any dimensionless factor? This is what the grandparent is referring to.
I know. And while I would prefer J as the unit for energy, I accept the convenience of Wh. The problem comes with Wh/x, where x is any unit of time. Why not cancel the h/x for a dimensionaless factor in this case?
I know (in the case of engineering anyway; I would hold joules are more used in science). I accept the convenience of Wh. The problem comes with Wh/x, where x is any unit of time. Why not cancel the h/x for a dimensionaless factor in this case?
It happens all the time in reporting. It seems to be part of the journalistic style guide to provide context to quantities by comparing them to another quantity. Here, both units contain the word "kilowatt" so they are used as comparisons.
Of course it's innumerate, but that's a broader problem for our society.
watt-hour itself is already a somewhat silly unit, since joule already exists and is part of the definition of watt. but people can easily multiply an appliance's watt rating by the amount of time they use it to estimate its monthly energy use, which makes it a convenient unit for billing. I would guess kWh/yr is an extension of this idea. you could use J/yr, but most people don't have an intuitive sense of how much power that is.
The USA more or less fully adopted the metric system in the 90s. All food is labeled in metric units for example. We just never abandoned imperial weights and measures. This leads to some amusing things like large bottles of soda and wine being measured in metric, while cans are measured in ounces. Then again we're not alone. The UK is considered officially metric, but they still pour beer in pints and weigh people in stone.
There are good arguments to be made for everyday use of Fahrenheit over Celsius. The 0-100 range in F cover pretty much all of the temperatures one is likely to experience in the USA. It also has a finer resolution than degrees Celsius in everyday weather temperature ranges.
The SI units are designed for scientific and engineering use and they excel for the purpose they are designed.
> There are good arguments to be made for everyday use of Fahrenheit over Celsius. The 0-100 range in F cover pretty much all of the temperatures one is likely to experience in the USA.
You're mostly right, but there are plenty of places in the US where the daily low temperature drops well below zero for significant parts of the year.
I guess the inconvenience with Celsius is that you're more likely to go to negative numbers? Is there a problem other than the having to say "minus ten degrees" vs "fourteen degrees"?
> It also has a finer resolution than degrees Celsius in everyday weather temperature ranges.
I'd make the opposite argument about everyday use. Most people I know would barely differentiate 25C from 26C, so there's not really a need for finer gradations. And the 10 degree increments are surprisingly convenient:
I like that table, and when I’ve been in Europe it’s pretty much what I’ve used. Oddly though while 30 degrees in southern Germany feels unbearably hot, 86 degrees in southern California is warmer than ideal, but not what I’d call scorching. I wonder to what extent it’s physical factors besides temperature and if there is a psychological effect from the temperature scales.
And height as well. It is hard to remember mostly 1.x metre high (rarely 2m). But in feet you can have change in the first unit. After all feet is about foot. More natural.
I'd imagine it has something to do with the timeframe that terms describing units of electricity came into common usage.
The U.S. is a signatory of the Metre Convention (1875). All of our customary units are defined as linear conversions of corresponding SI units. The Watt and Joule (also Ohm) were not standardized until 1893. Funnily enough, the international conference where these were officially decided happened in Chicago.
Because a home that uses 11000 kWh/yr doesn't use 1.25 kW. During low power usage times (middle of the night) it uses substantially less, and at peak times it uses substantially more. And even these values will shift with time of year and weather. kWh/yr implies you are averaging energy use over a substantial period of time, whereas kW is ambiguous on its own. MJ/yr would work as well and have a similar order of magnitude, but it doesn't really have any advantage in its favor.
Seems to make sense for capacity planning. The considerable daily and seasonal variation in use argues in favor of using the aggregate rather than expressing it as an average.
But electricity consumption was never measured in anything else. Here, it's because the aggregate unit, kWh, is present on the bill, so the derivation for kWh/year is easy to determine.
I think the first step towards large scale human activity in space is the construction of substantial industrial facilities on the moon. The central advantage of such facilities is that it will be much much cheaper to launch material into space from the moon, because it has lower gravity and less atmosphere. When those facilities are fully operational, we'll be able to send large numbers of vehicles into space, including big residential ships where lots of people could live for extended periods of time. It's not clear to me why it would be better to live on Mars (or some other planet/moon) than on a well-designed spaceship.
The central advantage of such facilities is that it will be much much cheaper to launch material into space from the moon...
Unless you're making things out of stuff that's already on the moon you'd have to get the raw material from Earth to the Moon, and then from the Moon to where you want it in space. There might well be advantages to doing that, raw materials can be fired in to space at higher Gs than manufactured parts using a railgun for example, but the cost of building a Moon factory is likely to mean the cost of building on the Moon is still much higher for a long time.
Seems to have plenty of iron and titanium and aluminum, but we have spent almost no time there so we don't really know. Well when I say 'we' haven't spent much time there I don't mean to speak for you. You may in fact have been born there for all I know. But the rest of us need to do more research I think before reaching any such conclusion. Or maybe we could just ask you.
Ok, tell me how many millions of tons of equipment and how many gigawatts of power we will need to process out large quantities of these resources from razor sharp sand, and how many trillions of dollars it will cost to build it on the moon?
We can process gold out of seawater, so why do we dig far into the earth to find veins of gold?
Only with the investment of massive amounts of energy and landing millions of tons of equipment to process regolith and melt out important components. The same materials can be found in near earth asteroids without that massive investment, or being buried in such a large gravity well.
It’s like saying we can process good out of seawater, which we can, but it’s hand waving away the massive difficulties.
The moon is a large gravity well that adds a hefty tax in deltaV cost to anything sent to or returned from it. It also devoid of useful resources and building materials, especially compared to near earth asteroids.
Building in low earth orbit will always be way cheaper.
Along with just about every other deep-space probe, and the recent Mars rovers. RTGs just give so much more power per pound in the outer solar system.
True reactors - not just RTGs - are a bit less common, but have a long history of use in the USSR's radar reconnaissance satellites. (The US only ever launched one, SNAP-10A [0]. The USSR launched more than 30)
It makes no sense. Curiosity was powered with solar cells.
The totality of Voyager’s scientific output is... low. Like most space exploration. A nuclear accident that distributes enriched plutonium as fine particles throughout the atmosphere would cause thousands of lives if the generally accepted theory of the harms of radiation (linear with exposure) are correct.
The problem is for human inhabitants, the size of an RTG needed to provide power would be enormous and extremely dangerous to put into orbit. A more traditional fission generator could be much safer to put into orbit with the right design constraints, and deliver about a hundred times more power.
One such design would be to fuel the reactor on-orbit, and to launch the fuel in a vehicle with an escape system and isolation cask to ensure the fuel's safety during launch even in the event of failure... even though I honestly don't believe NASA will choose this option because of the weight/multiple launch problem, and the fact that they really want a reactor that's autonomous with respect to fueling and almost all aspects of serviceability. They're already playing around with designs on their own, even before they started soliciting commercial manufacturers and design partners to get in on it, with Kilopower and their 1KW KRUSTY prototype.
Curiosity is powered by an RTG and has no solar cells. Spirit and Opportunity where solar powered, but where expected to only operate 90 days due to dust build up on the solar cells. Solar pretty much doesn't make any sense on the moon or Mars due to the environments.
A caveat - solar works on the Moon in certain circumstances (polar locations with sunlight most of the time), and on Mars with a bit of maintenance (Spirit and Opportunity lasted much longer than expected because of wind cleaning dust off the panels).
But yes, to your general point, nuclear power has serious advantages.
I’m kind of amazed anyone would say that. The Voyager probes revolutionised our understanding of the outer solar system, and provided vital information necessary for the planning of later missions.
At least on the surface of the moon, you're going to be in darkness for 14 days every 28. This not only means you won't be generating solar power, but your battery efficiency will probably also take a hit due to the cold temperatures (not to mention, you'll have to heat things too). So you'd have to have enough batteries for 14 days.
If you try a terraforming experiment on Mars and it fails, nobody's life/house/country/etc is ruined, which isn't true of geoengineering on Earth. I agree with the sentiment that there really is no Plan B to fixing climate change but that doesn't mean the goals of space colonization and fixing climate change are contrary.
Terraforming on Mars would take millennia, and over that long amount of time, settlement would presumably continue and the amount of colonists would grow. Thus, eventually flaws in the terraforming effort would eventually impact on local people.
Precious? The primary elements "wasted" in space exploration are aluminum, silicon, hydrogen, and oxygen. All of those things Earth is just lousy with. Even launching a rocket a day wouldn't put any sort of dent in the availability of any of those elements. A rocket a day also wouldn't meaningfully add to levels of harmful pollution. The Earth is really big. It has lots of pretty much everything.
Doing stuff in space is expensive in an economic sense but it's not really all that resource intensive. Most of the cost is paying people to design, test, fabricate, and operate the hardware.
Ok, but to put a rocket in space you need a surrounding economy on a specific technological level which is costly resourcewise. Could SpaceX or NASA happen in e.g. Congo, Nepal or Papua New Guinea alone?
It’s because the people interested in exploring and settling Mars are private citizens. Nuclear power is the ___domain of governments and/or highly regulated entities.
> the people interested in exploring and settling Mars are private citizens
which is what I argued against.
Also I'm pretty sure the national space agencies would like "colony of 1M people on Mars with solar power" too, and looking at the progress made they seem closer.
Or plonk three clusters of solar cells at 120 degree gaps and lay cable to connect them? No storms or weather to worry about damaging the cable and you'll always have power.
Getting 7,000 km of cabling on or below the moon’s surface and maintaining it (no storms or weather, but meteorites and radiation) may be the better choice, long-term, but I doubt it’s doable short-term.
Edit: it also won’t completely solve the power outage problem. The moon doesn’t receive direct sunlight at all during lunar eclipses, which can be over an hour.
Quote from Wikipedia : "the Moon's axis of rotation is sufficiently close to being perpendicular to the ecliptic plane that the radius of the Moon's polar circles is less than 50 km. Power collection stations could therefore be plausibly located so that at least one is exposed to sunlight at all times, thus making it possible to power polar colonies almost exclusively with solar energy. Solar power would be unavailable only during a lunar eclipse, but these events are relatively brief and absolutely predictable."
Calculate watts/kg for the total system, and be sure to include cost of heating, which comes nearly free with nukes, and you'll lean back to nuclear. The barrier to nukes is usually programmatic, not cost or technical.
I think this is referring to a nickel-iron battery, or NiFe for short. It's old tech, but is pretty indestructible. I have 20 of them in my off-grid system.
If building stuff is an option, 14 days might not be so bad.
You can store heat as heat, cooling as ice. They already need a huge water supply, why not freeze it for cooling?
Another option, unique to the moon. Why not just run wires to the sunny side. You could probably use uninsulated wire at a pretty high voltage. Nothing to disturb it or get electrocuted up there. You could do like 5 kilovolt on a hair thin wire to get usable amount of power across the moon with maybe 200lb of it
The short answer is reliability per watt. Solar's got lots of ups and downs which means designing bigger than you need. Batteries need replacing because they don't last forever. Solar panels have to be kept clean of dust on planets like Mars. Solar panels have to be deployed, which requires additional mechanisms that may fail or require human intervention, and so on.
The way they want to design reactors for next generation space exploration, they're set-it-and-forget-it designs. They have extremely few moving parts, and basically as soon as they're uninhibited, they'll run until something fails and their service life ends - likely several decades after construction. They're extremely reliable and are basically black-box sources of electrical power. Once they put it on the moon or Mars, they can just bury it under the regolith and run the cables back to where the habs are and forget about it. When it eventually fails, they can just leave it in the ground.
The biggest draw for nuclear power is continuous, autonomous processes, like thawing Mars permafrost for water, electrolyzing some of it for breathable oxygen and hydrogen, and using the hydrogen and carbon dioxide to make methane for return mission fuel for the complete in-situ resource utilization mission profile. These processes would run as soon as they were setup on Mars, without human intervention, and could run for months or years before humans even arrive, requiring no human intervention. Doing the same thing with solar would mean contesting with intermittency and having to actually assemble and maintain an enormous solar farm on Mars autonomously... We can't even manage that on Earth.
I'm surprised that nobody is commenting on the true exciting possibility left over: to directly mine (then use) uranium from Mars. Completely feasible, and completely sustainable. That would be a huge energy resource to develop Mars.
Benefits seem minimal too - Uranium is high density.
Creating water, oxygen, even rocket fuel, in situ makes perfect sense.
Only once you have a nearly self-sustaining group of colonies would you need to worry about insourcing fuel supply - and by then there may be better solutions to generate power (thorium, fusion, space based solar, etc)
You'd need to enrich it or use a breeder reactor if you wanted to do that all on Mars. Nuclear is so energy dense you'd be better off just including shipments of reactor fuel every 780 days on regular resupply missions than trying to come up with a way of enriching it on Mars. If you were considering a breeder reactor, Thorium appears to be more advantageous than Uranium on the Moon and Mars. Thorium is more plentiful and should be easier to extract in usable quantities and breeding Thorium-232 to Uranium-233 in a small reactor would seem to be more practical than breeding Uranium-238 to Plutonium-239 in i.e. a sodium cooled fast reactor.
and why in the world would we do that? you don't need a lot of uranium, and there's plenty on earth. yeah, let's get a bunch of equipment to mars and build a mine bumblefuck miles away where we can't even get a little toy car to function without breaking down in several years.
speaking of exciting possibilities: did you know we have the possibility of refining oil into jet fuel, right on an airplane? then we can use that jet fuel directly on the airplane.
They were talking about the future. One day if mars has high energy requirements, from settlements of anything really, solar panels may not be enough. In such a future developing nuclear power infrastructure on Mars might be worthwhile. But you only looked one inch in front of your face, and dismissed their comment so that you got to play the practical sensible engineer. What makes sense in engineering is context dependent, don't be so quick to dismiss.
one day, when mars has high energy requirements, it will still be easier to mine on earth and bring uranium to mars. there will never be a time when it is not. not sure what you are not getting here. unless you mean millions of years in the future, when humanity is dead, and mars is terraformed and as friendly an environment to build a mine as earth.
don't be so quick to make up stuff people never said.
Granted a solar array ON the moon is not going to work half the time. But how about a solar array on a satellite around the moon? It would be cheaper to deploy. Already exists. 10 kw can be generated by an array the size of a small rooftop. Getting the power to the moon is the remaining engineering challenge. And learning how to do this would have tremendous benefits for the exploration of space in general. Although current tech using masers exists, I cannot imagine why we could not use recently developed high frequency lasers to boil water on the moon to run a steam turbine. (Which we would need to get from a comet). Besides the obvious steampunk attraction of a steam engine on the moon, the presence of a large reservoir of heat energy at a stable temperature could facilitate the temperature regulation of a nearby colony. And the constant supply of energy could drive ion engines that use the dust of the moon as a reaction mass making trips to lunar orbit free.
I just don’t like the idea of concentrated points of failure that are easy to subvert into weapons like a dirty bomb. We need to be cognizant of human’s ability to turn even the best invention to evil when someone gets disgruntled. Failure modes need to be assessed for any technology going forward and must include intentionally engineered ‘successful’ attempts at causing failure. If the internet were designed to thwart the dark side of humanity, we might still have the beautiful thing that existed when the internet was first created: a channel for communication free of spam, advertising, spying, but that’s another rant. If we kept commerce OFF the net, it might still be a place where humans could enjoy the benefits of fellowship. Sorry I couldn’t help myself.
I really don't get the rush to try to travel to/colonize Mars. Mars is a really awful place for humans to live or visit, and it would be incredibly expensive to try.
Why not wait 50-100 years when we have safe, compact fusion reactors, have fast enough engines to reach Mars in under a month, and have an economic imperative to harvest the asteroid belt? We gain nothing meaningful now--we're just fulfilling the fantasy of some middle aged men.
Because the moon is a barren desert with much less scientific value and far fewer resources then Mars, that’s far more hostile to human life than Mars, and requires more fuel to travel to and return from.
There are a lot of resources on the Moon, including resources with great economic value. There are also many scientific benefits in having a permanent outpost there.
It is not really an issue whether the Moon is relatively more hostile. It is a minuscule complication, if one at all, compared to the issues with going to Mars, of which fuel is also a small issue that we know how to overcome.
As mentioned this is not a technical/scientific issue. It is simply that Mars is more 'exiting' and creates more buzz because it is the 'next frontier' while humans have already been to the Moon.
The book The Case For Mars does a good job arguing against the value of the moon and for the value of Mars. Mars has substantially more valuable resources, and more crucially, has many resources needed to sustain a colony. The moon is quite barren and would require enormous costs with little upside.
Name one economically valuable resource on the moon that isn’t far cheaper on Earth and far more accessible on Mars. I’m including H3 which is a valueless myth.
Then name any scientific value of manned moon missions and compare them to the fact Mars may have or had life.
Then compare 1/6th gee in a vacuum alternatively frozen and roasted over two week periods, to 1/3 gee in an actual atmosphere with moderate climate and abundant water.
Colonizing the Moon is a big step up. One progresses better when they have a step by step plan.
In my view, targeting Mars and ignoring the Moon is not a rational approach, it's an emotional and PR-driven driven approach. It's a less effective use of resources but grabs more headlines. There is also obviously the race aspect and the drive to be the first to reach a place.
But in the long term I suspect that reality will catch up with the hype and that actual colonization of Mars will be preceded by a step on the Moon.
You don’t understand the very rational reasons Mars is so much more attractive and easier to colonize than the moon.
• Mars requires less fuel to reach and land on, and you can land far larger cargo and crew on Mars.
• Its far easier to make fuel for return trips on Mars. This is an enormous force multiplier, enabling landing even larger cargo and crews.
• The moon is a barren desert with far less scientific value and far fewer usable resources.
• the moon is far more hostile to human life. It’s temperature extremes are about four times as great, and last two weeks vs a single day. Mars is awash in water at every ___location, the moon is virtually devoid of water. Having an atmosphere,,even a thin one makes Mars much more habitable.
Nope, because your chart doesn’t include the fact we will aerobrake on a Mars, requiring only a few hundred meters/sec for final landing burn, instead of the 2,500 meters/sec Luna requires.
Also you can easily make return fuel on Mars, which massively changes your payload to fuel ratio for the trip there.
We've already been to the moon though. We have not even set foot on Mars.
My point is to do both. Do things we've never done on the moon (colony/industry) while at the same time doing the things we've never done on Mars (set foot).
In the leading extreme sports (squirrel suits) you do die if you fail. Lots of people have.
I don’t understand the attraction, but there are tens of thousands of people who want to risk their lives to live on Mars, it’s part of the human exploration gene.
Indeed. Just wait until we're good at colonizing Mars. Then colonize Mars.
I tried this strategy once. In college, I picked up a cool looking electric guitar from a pawn shop and tried to learn to play it. It turns out, though, that I wasn't immediately good at it. Worse, it looked like it was going to take a ton of effort before I was playing crazy Eddie Van Halen solos and stuff.
So I decided to put the guitar in storage and wait until I was good at playing guitar before picking it back up again.
Oddly, 20 years later when I dug it out, I still wasn't any good at playing the guitar.
There were people who said the same thing about going to the Moon.
Ultimately, solving the myriad problems implied by the goal of, "get some men to the moon and then get them back again (alive)," resulted in myriad new technologies and breakthroughs to solve those problems, which were not (and could not have been) foreseen.
I suspect that getting to Mars and back (alive) will require solving just as many unanticipated problems and result in just as many new technologies and breakthroughs the ultimate benefits of which to mankind we cannot predict.
I could be wrong, of course. It could all be the fantasy of some middle age men.
Technology progression is not a given. Look at how stagnant space technology has been for the last 50 years.
Living on a single planet is extremely risky. We should minimize the time we spend as a single planet species. The earth is about 70% through it's lifetime, it won't last forever.
America was/is extremely fertile, requires nothing special to settle and is only six weeks away. There's breathable air, fresh water, trees, arable land, etc.
I think you simplify the reality of the situation. European colonies in the Americas overwhelmingly failed for centuries, and the ones that eventually succeeded were very fragile for a long time. Starting with the Norse settlements, and going until the English/French/Spanish started pouring massive resources into military and colony aid in order to control territories in America.
The people in those colonies died very quickly either from violence, starvation or just malnutrition. It turns out that European agricultural knowledge either didn't work, or wasn't considered an important mix in many of the colonies. The plant life was diffrent enough that even living off the land wasn't possible because people were just as likely to poison themselves with sumac/whatever as get lucky and find something edible. The results were a lot of failed crops, and starving settlers only kept alive with frequent resupply missions from Europe and the occasional trade with native peoples. The latter of which, turned bloody more frequently then we are willing to admit.
So, while they could breath the air, the difficulties and lack of knowledge were much the same as any mars colony we might try and start. Likely the results will be the same too. It will take hundreds of years of failures and people dying before the problem is understood well enough and the political/etc focus shifts sufficiently that one of them eventually succeeds. The results will likely be much the same, a vast increase in knowledge, not just for the colonists, but for those that remain. But instead of new foods, spices, gold and trading partners, there will be technology gains pushed forward in ways we cant imagine.
For starters, think of the environmental and biological understandings required to make life on mars long term sustainable that we don't currently have.
The point is Mars is far more attractive than the moon on that same scale. A self sustaining settlement on Mars is possible, it never will be on the Moon.
They already had carracks (ocean-going ships) when they embarked on this voyage. So what you are really saying is that we should wait for fusion reactors.
We will have SpaceX Starship within two years, and it’s capable of making the Mars trip in 3 months, while landing 100 tons of crew, equipment and supplies.
I don’t understand the rush to colonize the new works, when sailed ships take so long and are so dangerous, and our only energy sources are horses and fire wood. Better to wait hundreds of years until we have jet transportation and oil based power and heating.
We don't need to colonise Mars first. Luna can act as a perfectly good spring board to test and develop the tools and infrastructure needed to colonise the Red planet. It has a lower gravity well then Earth, meaning that there is a potential to develop new materials and drugs on the surface or in zero g that could benefit Earth.
Luna is a terrible platform. It still has a large gravity well that requires massive amounts of fuel to land on, and return from. And the moon is a desert devoid of useful resources.
Building in low earth orbit will always be far cheaper.
It has a gravity well, but it is not accurate to call it 'large.' LEO is deeper into a gravity well than the surface of the Moon; it takes less delta-v to get just about anywhere (including Geosync orbit) from the surface of the moon than from an LEO on an inclination given by a launch from Kennedy Space Center.
Nope, it takes far more delta-v to get from Luna to anywhere because everything launched from Luna first has to be landed on Luna. Without aerobraking that takes a large amount of delta-v.
While that’s certainly true for the most of us there’s also a risk-reward calculation involved. Imagine if you went there like 20 years before that, and developed the tech and know-how how to survive and operate. You could charge a premium for that.
There’s always those that think “I could be there sooner and dictate the market”.
Mars is a big place and would certainly develop its economy in the long run. Being first is a risky but often lucrative thing.
And finally there are people who want to go there “just because” that can also push progress, the wonderfully weird pioneers that pave the path forwards. Otherwise we’ll always end up with something like the cryogenics xkcd - https://xkcd.com/989/
I fell down a Wikipedia Hole deep into the history of nuclear reactors in space. There are many radioisotope heater units (RHUs) in space, such as those used by Chang'e 4 to survive the cold lunar nights, and radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), such as the MHW-RTGs used by the Voyagers, the GPHS-RTGs used by Cassini and New Horizons, and the MMRTGs used by Curiosity and Perseverance. (An RTG using 241Am has been proposed for an interstellar mission, as it’s 432 year half-life could provide 500+ years of power [1].) The only nuclear fission reactor launched by the US, and the world’s first, was SNAP 10-A, a 235U - Zirconium hydride reactor with a thermal power output of 30 kW and sodium-potassium (NaK) coolant. It was launched in 1965, stopped working after only 43 days, and has undergone 7 “anomalous events” in which nearly 50 trackable pieces have been seen shedding from the parent body. It should stay in orbit for 3000 years unless it breaks up further. The remaining 30 or so known launched fission reactors were in Soviet RORSATs: nuclear-powered, ocean-surveillance, active radar satellites in LEO that required periodic boosts to prevent reentry. They were designed to launch their enriched 235U reactors into a high orbit at the end of their operational lives, but this didn’t always happen. (Those high orbits will last 300-1000 years, but the nuclear fuel has a half-life of 70,000 years… so future generations may not think highly of us.) In 1978, the Cosmos 954 RORSAT malfunctioned, reentered, and broke apart over northern Canada with the reactor attached, scattering radioactive debris over a 800 km long region and increasing awareness of the challenges around space debris— the USSR eventually paid $3 million in cleanup liability, about a ⅕ of the true cost. Other satellites have also broken up and spread radioactive debris, including the US’s Transit 5BN3 (carried a SNAP RTG) and the USSR’s Cosmos 1402 RORSAT, or have leaked radioactive coolant in orbit, such as the higher power and higher orbit Kosmos 1818 and Kosmos 1867 RORSATs, which both seem to have leaked trails of metallic NaK coolant. The usefulness of the Gamma Ray Spectrometer on NASA’s SolarMax mission was reduced by anomalous gamma ray emissions from these higher reactors. Collisional breakups among the ~30 reactors in orbit are likely over the next few hundred years [2]. Near future use of nuclear power in space may include NASA’s Kilopower reactor and Advanced Stirling Radioisotope Generator, and potentially even nuclear rockets. Related: This 158 page NASA PDF [3] contains a delightfully detailed history of space debris and was a primary source for this writeup.
Although the title is bit misleading, power plants on mars is exciting. Everyone has been thinking about living on mars but I see that building infrastructure first before sending humans is the right way to go forward. Power is the first step towards it.
It is like water/river on earth. Civilizations are built and grown around them.
Hopefully we can find a sustainable way to dispose or recycle the waste from these reactors. POssibly for terraforming?
That was the whole basis for the Mars direct mode of propellant creation, and to be honest should be the only expansion of Human based Nuclear technology.
Elon is saying he's going to put football fields of Solar panel arrays on Mars according to Zubrin [1], as absurd as that sounds he probably will accomplish it given his track record how long it remains viable (dust storms on Mars can last months) is the real question, when in reality Nuclear technology should really only be used for these kind of purposes: high risk, limited option based energy creation. None of which apply to Earth, but do apply to Mars and I guess the Moon.
I won't rant about how incredibly foolish the mission to the Moon is here, not least of which putting a significant nuclear generation station on something that orbits the Earth is, but suffice it to say it makes more sense then building another on the Planet when we have so many more options.
How do you power e.g. a large (radio)telescope array on the Moon when it's on the dark side? It can be completely robot-controlled, but it would still need significant power.
Solar gets lots of love. But when planet-based its down 50% of the time - at night. Not very useful for life support.
I don't know why orbital solar isn't discussed more. Folks cite efficiency losses when transmitting to ground, but does it rise to 50% like ground-based?
I think you fundamentally misunderstand what’s needed. It’s more of a science fiction cliche that life support needs immense amounts of power. The earths life support is based on solar power and that has worked out just fine for humanity. Ideally life support should be as passive as possible, and using solar power is a great way to achieve that.
PS: Orbital solar is an issue due to launch costs, and the fact most electricity is used in the daytime. Solar + battery is also getting very cheap.
Understand that a colony on the Moon isn't there just as a proof of concept. Its there to do something, probably industrial. Running billion-dollar industrial processes only when the sun is shining, is clearly a downside.
If your talking scale that’s a question of economics.
Batteries + solar are already cheaper than new nuclear power on Earth over 24 hours. For Mars the reduced sunlight is an issue, but nuclear also faces major issues without ready water and very low atmospheric pressure. Low ground temperatures allow you to dissipate heat, but construction costs would be dramatically higher.
The moon is different due to extended day night cycles. Which also make it extremely unappealing for long term colonization. Trying build a reactor that still operates when ground temperatures hit 127 degrees Celsius is again very difficult.
Out past Mars solar is a poor fit. But, without something like cheap fusion power it’s extremely unlikely giant colonies would be viable anyway.
Oh! Mars may not be so poor for solar. Inverse-square means less sunlight per area, so less electricity. But thin atmosphere factors in too! Estimated Earth-based solar loses 90% by the time sunlight gets to the ground.
So in fact a solar panel in space around the asteroid belt (outside the orbit of Mars) gets about the same flux per square as Earth ground-based. If I estimated right.
Anyway, talking space-based solar vs ground-based solar (not nuclear). Due to the twin advantages of less atmosphere to get thru, and no/less night.
90% is wildly off base. In earths orbit you get ~1361 W/m2 and on the surface you can hit 1050W/m2 of direct sunlight and up to ~1120 W/m2 when including radiation scattered or reemitted by atmosphere and surroundings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_irradiance
Looking at averages is misleading. Clouds and the atmosphere on average reduce this significantly, but that’s very ___location specific. Near the poles the sun stays at very low angles 24/7 which significantly increases the average absorption. But, solar is a poor fit at the poles anyway.
Ok, don't know where I got that. Looking again, I see an average of a halving of total solar flux from space to sea level.
Mars is 144M miles from the sun, average. The earth is ~100M. That's a difference of about 1.44:1 which puts the inverse-square reduction due to different distances at 2:1.
What does that mean? Mars solar flux is about the same as Earth at sea level. So expect similar solar panel efficiencies.
But do they weigh any less? With solar in orbit, storage requirements may be far smaller. And batteries have got to be the biggest weight component in the system.
In order to get approval to launch nuclear material, the launch vehicle must be nuclear-rated (like human-rating, it ensures safety). With the recent retirement of the Delta II, only the Atlas V is currently nuclear-rated, but eventually others may be. Additionally, the fuel is encased in boxes designed to withstand launch failure and impact into the ocean without releasing the contents.
In the case of RTGs, the fuel is always releasing heat and is always radioactive. For fission reactors, the fuel is relatively inert and non-radioactive until it is turned on.
The casing works pretty well. I believe there's even an instance where there WAS a launch failure with an RTG (Atlas V has never had a legitimate launch failure and it has flown almost 100 times), and they fished it out and reused the fuel for another mission.
Many reactors are envisioned to be launched by chemical means and then turned on remotely. Before a nuclear reactor turns on and starts splitting atoms, you can hold its fuel in your hand no problem.
Not necessarily a problem. You don’t have to launch it with the fuel rods in, if it would be safer to store the fuel rods a different way for launch. Ultimately you do need high levels of safety, but only about the same level that’s needed for ships at sea, since many of them have nuclear reactors.
In this case, it was reentry of a reactor that had been running for a few months. If a rocket carrying a reactor blew up, it would probably cause less damage since the reactor would have fewer (if any?) hours on it.
We aren’t sure how much regolith is mixed with that ice, or how we can process it without using massive amounts of energy. It’s not like Mars where water and CO2 are everywhere.
It’s a terrible test bed for Mars because it’s environment is so vastly different.
- You can’t use use aerobraking to land. This means you can land much larger cargos on Mars.
- Your habitat has to be able to withstand temps at least 150 degrees colder and 200 degrees hotter than what Mars requires.
- Your climate control system has to manage this heat/cold for two weeks at a time instead of 12 hours at a time.
- Since there is no atmosphere or rain, Luna has razor sharp dust. You need entirely different space suits.
- To survive you need power storage to last for two weeks at a time instead of 12 hours at a tube.
- The moon doesn’t have liquid water, or easily accessible water ice.
- It’s ice is mixed in rocks frozen at absolute zero buried in polar craters, hundreds of degrees colder than motions of square KM of Martian surface ice sheets hundreds of meters deep.
- Luna doesn’t have any easily accessible CO2, or Carbon, or the same for Iron, which litters the surface of Mars.
- You can’t produce methane as fuel on the moon, only H2. H2 is much harder to store for long periods.
- Etc, etc
Yes, because testing on the moon won’t tell us much about how things work on Mars. Having the test environment closer is obviously beneficial, but only if the tests are predictive.
We are better off testing in Antarctica, given it being a much closer environmental match for Mars.
How bad would it be if whatever fissile material is needed for this (presumably much larger than previously) power plant were exploded above Florida in a rapid unscheduled disassembly?
For actual fission reactors and not RTGs, it's not bad. The reactors are safe to be around until they're switched on, and this sort of reactor design won't be switched on until it's in its final position.
Incredibly exciting! We’re living a new Cold War like space race and China is catching up.
I wonder what are the perceived economic and military benefits of establishing a presence on Mars. Or is it just political capital? What happens if China gets there first? Will they claim it?
Simple and genuine question, why does the US feel entitled to all natural resources and do as it pleases ? Isn't the Moon and the mars common to all humanity ? Why does the US assume it can do whatever it wants on these planets ? With this, other countries will join the race, and soon moon and mars will be exploited just like we have unleashed massive ecological destruction on earth.
The moon and Mars do not have an ecology to destroy.
Ecology (from Greek: οἶκος, "house", or "environment"; -λογία, "study of")[A] is a branch of biology[1] concerning interactions among organisms and their biophysical environment, which includes both biotic and abiotic components.
Furthermore, from a thought experiment point of view: if we jump a thousand or two thousand years into the future, it’s hard to imagine that the Earth retains individual nations but the rest of the universe is managed by a UN-like organization. The moon, maybe, but beyond that seems highly unlikely.
True, but i wasn't referring to exploitation of the ecology on the Moon - of course, there is no ecology on Moon. I was referring to the ecological destruction on earth (consumer culture and profit motives driving us to the brink of ecological collapse on earth). There are other studies where impacts of the first world countries and their economies on the planet is well documented, but i do not wish to enter into that conversation as such.
Countries are thinking of planets as resources to be extracted and profit from, which in itself is incorrect, imo.
I would actually argue that the ecologically-minded should push for off-world resource extraction and industrial production, as it would allow for the Earth to return to a more harmonic state.
You made some interesting points down below, but i couldn't reply to those, hence responding here :)
Tbh, i am enjoying your arguments as such!
> barring some sort of total worldwide wipe of electronic data, the information and knowledge will still be out there
Isn't the world shifting in its warfare strategies ? We fought with different tools at different times. But the modern warfare seems to be moving towards misinformation, destruction of information etc ?
> I'd say it's inevitable that over time, humans will re-centralize and re-organize.
Agreed! It seems that eventually we would have to re-organize!
> Civilizations seem to benefit from having competition, as long as they don't destroy / are destroyed by them. It's a fine balance.
Agree with this one too, but i am more worried about generations that would follow us. It is a very fine balance indeed, hope humanity treads it with reason :)
> Isn't the world shifting in its warfare strategies ? We fought with different tools at different times. But the modern warfare seems to be moving towards misinformation, destruction of information etc ?
Well, I meant more like basic industrial and scientific knowledge, e.g., that petroleum can be used as a fuel, or that the universe is quite large and the Earth revolves around the Sun. Even if 99% of the world's civilizations were erased and you had a zombie/nuclear/etc. hellscape, I don't see people losing this basic sort of knowledge. It's simply too pervasive. The idea of humanity returning to a caveman-level of knowledge seems unlikely to me.
> It is a very fine balance indeed, hope humanity treads it with reason :)
> The idea of humanity returning to a caveman-level of knowledge seems unlikely to me.
Agreed! :)
Also, do you have or maintain a list of great books which you came across ? I see your profile, and you mention "Philosopher, writer and entrepreneur traveling the world."
That is an interesting POV, which i have considered too. But in order to reach Mars / Moon - don't we need resources from earth in order to build ? Resource extraction is energy intensive. It consumes a lot of energy here on earth. How much energy would it require to first build and then transport resources from other planets back to earth etc ? What would be the impact in case during re-entry with resource payload from other planets, a spacecraft propelled by nuclear energy bursts ? What are the other unknowns which we are willing to take for granted ?
I mean, we are already in sci-fi territory here, but it seems inevitable that industry and mining will be pushed off-world, no matter what the short-term ecological costs are. Natural resources on Earth are infinitesimally small compared to the vastness of the universe. It might take a few centuries, or even a millennium, but even on human timescales this isn't really a long time. Consider that the Roman Empire was at its apex 2,000 years ago, and then imagine the world in 4,000 A.D.
> How much energy would it require to first build and then transport resources from other planets back to earth etc ? What would be the impact in case during re-entry with resource payload from other planets, a spacecraft propelled by nuclear energy bursts ? What are the other unknowns which we are willing to take for granted ?
A lot, no doubt, but still probably less than having energy and industrial production on Earth, in the long term.
Right :) But all resources are finite regardless of how far we travel. Civilizations may collapse before we accomplish everything we set out to do on other planets. There are two aspects to be taken care of, one is the exploration of space and the other is maintaining the fragile environment (socio-political-economic) here on earth.
Also, if countries co-operate on space exploration it would be better, than making it a race to be first etc. Which will only lead to worse outcomes between nations if history is any indicator. :)
> But all resources are finite regardless of how far we travel.
Not in any sense which is meaningful on a human scale.
> Civilizations may collapse before we accomplish everything we set out to do on other planets
I still don't think it matters. A nuclear war could set back Earth by centuries or millenniums, but barring some sort of total worldwide wipe of electronic data, the information and knowledge will still be out there. I'd say it's inevitable that over time, humans will re-centralize and re-organize. Again, it may take thousands and thousands of years, but on the timescale of the universe, this is nothing.
> if countries co-operate on space exploration it would be better, than making it a race to be first etc. Which will only lead to worse outcomes between nations if history is any indicator. :)
This sounds ideal, but I don't think history actually supports it. The prime achievements of American space travel came during the peak of the Cold War. Civilizations seem to benefit from having competition, as long as they don't destroy / are destroyed by them. It's a fine balance.
Nietzsche writes about this a bit during his discussion of the Ancient Greek concept of agon:
Space research and development has indeed given us some very useful outcomes - no doubt. Also, other countries are into space research and development too, worried that this could put other able countries in a race that could result in bad outcomes.
We have plenty of problems to solve here on earth. Is technology only about solving for curiosity of what is possible ? Or is technology about solving real problems of energy, minimal impact to the environment etc ?
The ocean cleanup project is a good example of solving problems for humanity here on earth. Now that we managed to dump enormous amounts of plastic into our waterways and eventually into oceans. There are other interesting problems which beg technological solutions too.
People running space exploration are not interested in making life better for other humans. They just want to develop technology without any strings attached. This is excellent for companies that will later get technology transfers, i.e., free tech researched with public money. In the end it is an excuse to enrich the 1% even more, a free lunch for the rich.
I just got downvoted for saying something similar :) That isn't the problem. The reason i shared these opinions here on HN, is due to the faith in the HN community that they would be willing to have a civil discourse even if its opposed to their worldview. That is something i least expect from the HN community. :)
I would be happy if those who downvoted without reading the entire argument, would also contribute their views on why this argument is wrong :)
It's not - the US is pursuing an international treaty called the Artemis Accords to clarify rights and obligations, which aren't laid out in detail in the Outer Space Treaty.
If the drafting is completed under the Trump Administration, I suspect it will be tilted towards a free-for-all, but it will need buy-in at least from the Europeans and Japanese (who are building and funding big chunks of the new US moon effort) who will want some form of multilateral control.
An international treaty signed by the US is worthy absolutely nothing. They are retreating from treaties signed years ago such as nuclear weapons control, OMS, ALCA, the treaty with Iran, etc, with no consequences.
> The U.S. wants to build nuclear power plants that will work on the moon and Mars, and on Friday put out a request for ideas from the private sector on how to do that.
Stop picking fights with all the other countries. Take climate change seriously. Maybe then you can survive long enough to build things on Mars.
I haven't seen any major spacefaring nation opposed to this - the Soviets and Americans both put reactors in orbit during the Cold War, and only the Soviet ones caused safety problems.
Not entirely true, SNAP-10A is still in orbit and has suffered some degradation (parts coming off), that may have led to radioactive release.
However the Soviets crashed several RORSAT reactors actually on earth, which is indeed much worse (and many cores are still up there in parking orbits)
Plus the RORSATs leaked coolant all over the place, which is both a radioactivity and debris hazard.
But in any case, these are all problems that are both less likely with new designs (e.g. kilopower uses sealed heat pipes with no moving parts for coolant), and less of a concern when the reactors are either in interplanetary/cislunar space or are nice and buried.
Yes. This will ensure that other countries also will stop fighting and take climate change seriously. And of course, every country will also learn to sit tight instead of racing to explore space while USA figures out climate change.
While I get the intent of what you are saying, you should know that the US is the only space faring nation that is trying hard to be collaborative and inclusive in the peaceful exploration and utilization of space and space exploration.
>the US is the only space faring nation that is trying hard to be collaborative and inclusive
Hasn't the US been using Russian facilities and rockets to go to the (jointy built with Russia and others) ISS for the past decades? That seems collaborative to me...
this is insane. the full cradle-to-grave lifecycle of nuclear energy on our own planet is shamefully underdeveloped given how much we rely on nuclear power.
-plants are run far longer than their lifespan was ever designed. most have posted leaks and accidents of various sizes that could be easily avoided.
-waste is just buried. no attempt at salvage, and nothing can be done to make it safe. the US has 80 sites alone. most will be dangerous indefinitely.
-3 mile island, fukushima, and chernobyl could likely all have been prevented. all include an exclusion zone of some shape or size. none have experienced meaningful amounts of cleanup.
-Nuclear is a one-time thing. one you exhaust the mines on the moon, youre out of power and you've done nothing to embrace renewable energy.
-renewable energy is essentially infinite on the moon. the moon can reach 120c, easily enough to drive steam turbines. there is plenty of room for both terrestrial and tethered orbital solar sails.
the whole effort smacks of pandering to a dying industry.
- There were metal coupons placed in the reactors at the beginning that they pull out occasionally and test all the time to see if the vessel is still ok to run. So far so good. Other equipment can be maintained or replaced.
- Nuclear power is the only energy source I'm aware of that internalizes all of its waste. Commercial nuclear sits in dry casks which have never, to my knowledge, injured or killed a single person. C.f. fossil and biofuel waste which kills 8 million people per year (!)
- Nuclear energy is renewable. There's enough uranium in seawater to power breeders for millions of years, and that replenishes continuously through runoff and plate tectonics for billions of years (~as long as the sun will run). http://large.stanford.edu/publications/coal/references/docs/...
For space, Voyager 1 is still sending nuclear-powered signals back from beyond the solar system. It was launched in 1977
Nuclear energy does have some pretty legitimate physical advantages in space thanks to good old E=MC²
This is misinformed. The full cradle-to-grave lifecycle of nuclear power on our planet is underdeveloped or halted due to alarmism.
- Waste can definitely be reprocessed if new power plant reactors were built, capable of burning such waste; we have a few such reactors but too few to process all the waste in a short time. An additional problem is that the waste contains plutonium, and various nuclear weapons limitation treaties may have clauses about production of plutonium. (Pu is of course a fine nuclear reactor fuel, if used correctly.)
- 3 Mile Island disaster [1] and Fukushima disaster ended up with very, very few casualties. Chernobyl, of course, produced many casualties, but to achieve that, the operators had to explicitly switch off almost all the safety systems of the reactor, and then do a number of grossly incompetent actions. Fukushima had a huge tsunami and a huge earthquake, and misconfigured cooling pumps.
- Nuclear is a one-time thing. But that time is plenty long. I do not expect the nuclear reactors on the moon to ever exceed 10 GW of power in total. Also, there are no plans to mine uranium on the Moon; a ton of fuel delivered from Earth would last quite a long time.
- Renewable energy definitely should be harvested on the Moon! But to pass it to the dark side, you'd need to build and maintain serious transmission infrastructure. It could be more expensive and less reliable than a small local reactor.
> 3 mile island, fukushima, and chernobyl could likely all have been prevented. all include an exclusion zone of some shape or size. none have experienced meaningful amounts of cleanup.
That's just wrong. Fukushima has been and still is getting a major cleanup operation. They removed the top layers of soil in many places. For chernobyl it's not economic because the Ukraine is very sparsely populated.
While I like nuclear tech, we do need to acknowledge the cost and time-to-build problem.
Reactors take so long to build that by the time they are operational, the tech is out-dated. While newer reactors should make a meltdown almost impossible, insuring against it is still quite expensive. This lead to high operational costs.
There are some pretty wild solutions to this out there, like building large floating power plants in shipyards. Assembly line style. This was highly developed by a joint venture between Newport news and Westinghouse in the 1970s.
Also, an important true fact is nuclear economics today are on par with system economics of all other hypothesized low carbon energy systems. Though wind and solar generator prices will fall, grid integration and storage will add $40/MWh. Nuclear is already right where other options will end up.
The cost assumptions in that report don't extend high enough for nuclear. The "mid-range" cost for nuclear is given as $4700/kW. The "conservative" cost for nuclear is $7000/kW.
But Flamanville 3 is going to finish at over $8800/kW even if there are no further delays or overruns. Hinkley Point C is also over $8800/kW. Vogtle 3 and 4, if they complete without any further budget overruns, are going to be over $11000/kW.
Nuclear projects have such terrible track records on cost and schedule that they are going to be a last resort in any foreseeable cost-conscious decarbonization plan for the US. Which is too bad, because they really do crank out clean energy after they are completely built and operating.
> renewable energy is essentially infinite on the moon. the moon can reach 120c, easily enough to drive steam turbines.
Why bother with steam turbines (and a system to reject heat), when you could use solar panels? Regardless of how sunlight is captured, how do you handle the 14 days of darkness?
> -renewable energy is essentially infinite on the moon. the moon can reach 120c, easily enough to drive steam turbines. there is plenty of room for both terrestrial and tethered orbital solar sails.
If you're designing for set-it-and-forget-it, nuclear on the moon works remarkably well. Solar panels degrade over time, so it's not like there's a permanent solution anyways. Disposal is also taken care of - just leave it there, where there's no water to carry it anywhere, no potential future primitive peoples to worry about, and nothing to contaminate.
Solar concentration into steam turbines, on the other hand, takes a lot more surface area, more moving parts, and only works for half the month. Same with solar, barring the moving parts. I'm not sure what you're referring to with solar sails, either - that's a propulsion method, not a power source.
> -Nuclear is a one-time thing. one you exhaust the mines on the moon, youre out of power and you've done nothing to embrace renewable energy.
While nuclear is theoretically a limited resource, in practice this means that we could power the entire world for hundreds of years without even touching off-planet solutions. So, "non-renewable", but also long enough to comfortably hold us over until we finally crack fusion sometime in the next 200 years.
> -3 mile island, fukushima, and chernobyl could likely all have been prevented. all include an exclusion zone of some shape or size. none have experienced meaningful amounts of cleanup.
This is just stupid, and standard anti-nuclear FUD. 3 mile island has no exclusion zone, for one - unless you count the reactor building itself. Fukushima Daiichi has seen extraordinary amounts of cleanup, and efforts are still ongoing. Chernobyl has seen minimal attempts to reclaim land in the exclusion zone, though.
> -waste is just buried. no attempt at salvage, and nothing can be done to make it safe. the US has 80 sites alone. most will be dangerous indefinitely.
That we do this with waste is political, not a practical matter. France reprocesses the vast majority of their high-grade waste into more fuel, and low-grade waste is dangerous for a few centuries at most. Stick it in a block of glass at the bottom of a mine and be done with it.
> -plants are run far longer than their lifespan was ever designed. most have posted leaks and accidents of various sizes that could be easily avoided.
Plants receive life extensions, just like most other things in the west today. Like bridges, or combat aircraft. This isn't a sign that we should get rid of all old bridges, or A-10s. And yes, if we were building replacements, small incidents would be less likely to occur. But I'm unaware of any incidents resulting in significant release of radioactivity in the US since 3 Mile Island. (and calling that significant is perhaps a bit of a stretch)
There have been nuclear power plant accidents, listed here [0], but they're not what you're talking about. For instance, from 2013: "One worker was killed and two others injured when part of a generator fell as it was being moved at the Arkansas Nuclear One." This is not a nuclear power accident. This is a conventional accident that happened to occur at a nuclear power plant.
So, I don't think your comment brings anything substantive to the table besides fear, uncertainty, doubt and misinformation. There are valid concerns for using nuclear reactors to power moon bases - I would include "increased risk of schedule slip" and "long term reliance on untested designs", but "just use solar panels" and "nuclear waste is bad" aren't the things that I would have picked.
In order to get approval to launch nuclear material, the launch vehicle must be nuclear-rated (like human-rating, it ensures safety). With the recent retirement of the Delta II, only the Atlas V is currently nuclear-rated, but eventually others may be. Additionally, the fuel is encased in boxes designed to withstand launch failure and impact into the ocean without releasing the contents.
In the case of RTGs, the fuel is always releasing heat and is always radioactive. For fission reactors, the fuel is relatively inert and non-radioactive until it is turned on.