Subject: Re: =?UTF-8?Q?=E2=80=9CNASA?= Accelerates Moon Base Plans With
100-Kilowatt Nuclear Reactor to Outpace =?UTF-8?Q?China=E2=80=9D?=
On 2025-08-14, Scott Lurndal <
scott@slp53.sl.home> wrote:
“NASA Accelerates Moon Base Plans With 100-Kilowatt Nuclear Reactor to >>Outpace China”
>>https://thelibertydaily.com/nasa-accelerates-moon-base-plans-100-kilowatt-nuclear/
right-wing rag.
I read it on German tech news site heise.de, so it must have come
from a NASA press release and the leanings of the news aggregator
don't matter.
They'll need to design a brand new reactor which can dissipate all
the waste heat involved in power production with no atmosphere
and no nearby river or ocean.
Knowing nothing about small nuclear reactors, I looked at submarine
reactors for comparison.[1] Those deliver around 150 _mega_watts
of power. Oops.
Then I, too, started wondering how to dump waste heat on the moon.
You use a radiator? To make a radiator as efficient as possible,
you want it to be as hot as possible. But to make your heat engine
as efficient as possible, you want to dump the waste heat at the
lowest possible temperature. Now that calls for an interesting
engineering compromise.
But 100 kW is really small.
[1] In Kim Stanley Robinson's _Red Mars_, a small nuclear reactor
was referred to as a "Rickover"--after US admiral Hyman G.
Rickover, who was instrumental in developing and deploying
nuclear propulsion in the US Navy. I think I understood that
reference only later when Wikipedia came along.
--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber
naddy@mips.inka.de
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