Certainly should weigh and cost less "the reactor cannot weigh more than 7,700 pounds..."
Certainly should weigh and cost less "the reactor cannot weigh more than 7,700 pounds..."
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:
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.