U.S. eyes building nuclear power plants on the moon, Mars
time.com
time.com
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.
Nobody knows what kind of innovations a huge readily available sustainable energy supply would allow, but I bet they'd be cool.
(2) Cooling. Space is hot. (+400c)
(3) Running the computer.
(4) Running the communications gear.
(5) Cooling 4+5.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Contro...
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.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/200900...
I don't think there was any way to save and restart anything if an engine failed as it would have likely destroyed the engine.
https://rps.nasa.gov/system/downloadable_items/36_APP_ASRG_F...
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.
[1]https://www.livemint.com/Leisure/3QfYqLadggrbnrn41H0mAJ/The-...
Which makes the main danger that the Plutonium may get into the wrong hands.
* Happy to learn if that's wrong :)
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.
You could potentially make a dirty bomb out of one. Just a conventional warhead that sprays radioactive fallout.
I’m not sure I’d be happy if you were wrong about this...
[1] https://englishrussia.com/2009/01/06/abandoned-russian-polar...
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.
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).
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.
Btw, what are non-residential homes?
1 Wh = 3600 joules
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.
Are you trying to measure an angle, draw a particular angle, or confirm that an angle meets a particular standard?
0.02 radians would absolutely be a ridiculous unit of measurement if you were a carpenter or draftsman in the age before computing.
But if you're trying to measure an angle, this is totally irrelevant. The angle is whatever it is.
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.
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.
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.
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:
-20 (or less) dangerously cold
-10 -- -20 damn cold
-10 -- 0 winter
0 -- 10 chilly
10 -- 20 brisk
20 -- 30 hot
30 -- 40 sweltering
40 -- 50 damn hot
50 (or more) dangerously hotFrom experience I'd say a sauna with 45°C and 80% humidity is about comparable with one at 80°C and 10% humidity.
Just using kW for your average power usage over a year seems more intuitive to me.
Of course it's innumerate, but that's a broader problem for our society.
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.
It’s like saying we can process good out of seawater, which we can, but it’s hand waving away the massive difficulties.
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.
We can process gold out of seawater, so why do we dig far into the earth to find veins of gold?
Building in low earth orbit will always be way cheaper.
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)
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.
But yes, to your general point, nuclear power has serious advantages.
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.
Certainly should weigh and cost less "the reactor cannot weigh more than 7,700 pounds..."
That said, the ISS uses enough solar panels to generate 120kW, so it's certainly possible.
doesnt seem that bad actually. Perhaps the batteries would die too quickly being charged/discharged so often.
I find those pushing solar on Mars to be more perplexing, for humans to go there we are going to need nuclear, there's simply no way around this.
Many have an understandable aversion to nuclear but for anything on other bodies the alternatives can't compete.
AFAIK no private company or individual has ever sent anything to mars while national space agencies have launched or tried to launch 147 missions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_Mars
> 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.
The amount of geoengineering needed to make Mars hospitable would solve all environmental problems on earth five times over.
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.
https://sservi.nasa.gov/articles/selene-data-suggests-no-per...
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_the_Moon#Pol...
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."
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 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.
See also/specifically:
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.
don't be so quick to make up stuff people never said.
Setting up the facilities to mine, process and purify uranium on another planet does seem like a major technical challenge to me.
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)
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.
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.
It is obviously much nearer, travel is much simpler and cheaper, and communication is near instant (1s delay vs. ~30 minutes).
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.
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).
• 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.
Also you can easily make return fuel on Mars, which massively changes your payload to fuel ratio for the trip there.
Regardless, I don't think risk of death should dissuade humanity from doing things as long as the people at risk are aware of it.
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.
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.
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.
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 put it to you that in 2020, this is a factually correct statement.
Mars is far more distant and hostile.
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.
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.
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.
Building in low earth orbit will always be far cheaper.
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.
I'm sure it's different with space travel though.
[1] http://www.niac.usra.edu/files/library/meetings/misc/trieste... [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0273117791... [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20170503083646/https://ston.jsc....
(If you're into this sort of nerdery, I write about this stuff weekly in The Orbital Index - https://orbitalindex.com)
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?
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.
1: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/mars-elon-musk-plan-t...
https://www.nature.com/news/2007/071023/full/news.2007.182.h...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Using those nuclear power plants?
- 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
Are you advocating that we try to go straight to Mars rather than testing (some) things out on the moon first?
We are better off testing in Antarctica, given it being a much closer environmental match for Mars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNAP-10A
The NERVA program was one part (mostly for propulsion) with many reactor tests.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA
The Soviets had a few dozen nuclear reactors in space powering satellites hunting submarines.
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?
on edit: not that this gives the U.S rights to it, but ecological destruction is not a result of the U.S exploiting the Moon.
Countries are thinking of planets as resources to be extracted and profit from, which in itself is incorrect, imo.
This is a kinder way of living in harmony with our nature (again imo) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Lc_dlVrg5M
> 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.
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. :)
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:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agon
https://sites01.lsu.edu/faculty/voegelin/wp-content/uploads/...
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 :)
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 :)
Agreed!
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."
I would love to see your bookshelf :)
- Nietzsche's Philosophy of Religion by Julian Young
- The Portable Nietzsche by Kaufmann
- A Secular Age by Charles Taylor
- The Art of the Islamic Garden by Emma Clark
- Notes on Culture by T. S. Eliot
- In Praise of Shadows by Tanizaki
- The Qur'an: Oxford World Classics
- On Bohemia by Graña
- The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt
- The Individual and His Property by Stirner
If you start maintaining a list, would there be a way to know that ? Would you be sharing here on HN ?
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.
I would be happy if those who downvoted without reading the entire argument, would also contribute their views on why this argument is wrong :)
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.
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.
Stop picking fights with all the other countries. Take climate change seriously. Maybe then you can survive long enough to build things on Mars.
They also did not recently create “space force” to militarize space and pander for votes in the most obnoxious way possible.
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...
/s
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)
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.
-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.
- 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 (!)
- See fossil and biofuel externalities above. When you consider all these accidents, the safety of nuclear is still on par with wind and solar. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
- 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
- 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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident#Hea...
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.
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.
The biggest enemy of nuclear is economics.
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.
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. 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.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor_accidents_in_t...
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?